THEB0HIENIECTURESJ878 


BY  F.D.HUNTINGTON. S.T.D. 


BISHOP  OF  CENTRAL  NEW  YORK 


^X  \\\t  Mtokgkitt  J 


:^^-'//, 


S/ie//. 


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PRINCETON,    N.    J. 


w^       oT^r    I 


BR    45     .B63    1878 

Huntington,  F.  D.  1819-1904, 

Fitness  of  Christianity  to 
man 


p 


THE    BOHLEN    LECTURES,    1878 


THE 


Fitness  of  Christianity  to  Man 


F.  D. ^HUNTINGTON,  S.T.D., 


BISHOP    OF    CENTRAL    NEW    YORK, 


Author  of  Graha7iie  and  Lowell  Lectures  on  the  ''^ Divine  Aspects  of 

Human  Society^^    '''■Christian  Believing  and  Living,''^    ^^''Serinons 

/or  the  People^''  '■'■Christ  in  the  Christian  Year,''^  etc 


PRINTED    FOR  THE   RECTOR,   CHURCH  WARDENS,   AND   VESTRYMEN    OF  THE    CHURCH 

OF  THE   HOLY  TRINITY,    PHILADELPHIA,   TRUSTEES  OF  THE 

JOHN   DOHLEN   LECTURESHIP 


NEW   YORK 
THOMAS    WHITTAKER 

2  Bible  House 
1 878 


It  was  required  that  the  matter  contained  in  this  small  volume 
should  be  delivered  in  a  church  to  an  audience  not  differing  much 
from  the  congregations  that  generally  gather  in  cities  for  worship, 
except  as  it  might  happen  to  include  a  larger  proportion  of  edu- 
cated minds.  It  was  also  demanded  by  the  terms  of  the  lecture- 
ship that  the  lectures,  having  been  so  delivered,  should  be  forth- 
with issued  in  print  as  a  treatise.  To  almost  any  student  this 
twofold  necessity  must  be  somewhat  embarrassing,  as  involving 
a  certain  literary  incompatibilit3\  It  will  appear  that  I  chose  to 
keep  before  me  in  writing  the  assembly  of  hearers,  and  have  not 
thought  it  worth  while  to  take  pains  to  strike  out  some  forms  of 
expression  and  some  illustrative  passages  belonging  to  a  public 
address. 

I  had  contemplated  the  use  of  a  considerable  array  of  references 
to  authorities,  and  to  agreeing  or  differing  authors.  But  on  the 
whole  I  see  no  worthy  occasion  for  it,  and  therefore  present  only 
a  few  marginal  acknowledgments  to  writers  to  whom  I  am  con- 
scious of  being  indebted.  F.  D.    H. 

Syracuse,  Easter-Tuesday,  1878. 


Copyright,  1878,  by  T.  Whittaker. 


The  John  Bohlen  Lectureship. 


John  Bohlen,  who  died  in  this  city  on  the  26th  day 
of  April,  1874,  bequeathed  to  trustees  a  fund  of  One 
Hundred  Thousand  Dollars,  to  be  distributed  to  religious 
and  charitable  objects  in  accordance  with  the  well-known 
wishes  of  the  testator. 

By  a  deed  of  trust,  executed  June  2,  1875,  the  trustees, 
under  the  will  of  Mr.  Bohlen,  transferred  and  paid  over 
to  "  The  Rector,  Church  Wardens,  and  Vestrymen  of  the 
Church  of  the  Holy  Trinity,  Philadelphia,"  in  trust,  a  sum 
of  money  for  certain  designated  purposes,  out  of  which 
fund  the  sum  of  Ten  Thousand  Dollars  was  set  apart  for 
the  endowment  of  The  John  Bohlen  Lectureship, 
upon  the  following  terms  and  conditions: 

"  The  money  shall  be  invested  in  good  substantial  and 
safe  securities,  and  held  in  trust  for  a  fund  to  be  called 
The  John  Bohlen  Lectureship,  and  the  income  shall  be 
applied  annually  to  the  payment  of  a  qualified  person, 
whether  clergyman  or  layman,  for  the  delivery  and  pub- 
lication of  at  least  one  hundred  copies  of  two  or  more 
lecture  sermons.  These  lectures  shall  be  delivered  at 
guch  time  and  place,  in  the  city  of   Philadelphia,  as  the 


persons  nominated  to  appoint  the  lecturer  shall  from 
time  to  time  determine,  giving  at  least  six  months'  notice 
to  the  person  appointed  to  deliver  the  same,  when  the 
same  may  conveniently  be  done,  and  in  no  case  selecting 
the  same  person  as  lecturer  a  second  time  within  a  pe- 
riod of  five  years.  The  payment  shall  be  made  to  said 
lecturer,  after  the  lectures  have  been  printed  and  received 
by  the  trustees,  of  all  the  incgme  for  the  year  derived 
from  said  fund,  after  defraying  the  expense  of  printing 
the  lectures  and  the  other  incidental  expenses  attending 
the  same. 

"The  subject  of  such  lectures  shall  be  such  as  is  within 
the  terms  set  forth  in  the  will  of  the  Rev.  John  Bampton, 
for  the  delivery  of  what  are  known  as  the  'Bampton 
Lectures,'  at  Oxford,  or  any  other  subject  distinctively 
connected  with  or  relating  to  the  Christian  Religion. 

"  The  lecturer  shall  be  appointed  annually  in  the  month 
of  May,  or  as  soon  thereafter  as  can  conveniently  be 
done,  by  the  persons  who  for  the  time  being  shall  hold 
the  offices  of  Bishop  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 
of  the  Diocese  in  which  is  the  Church  of  the  Holy  Trinity; 
the  Rector  of  said  Church ;  the  Professor  of  Biblical  Learn- 
ing, the  Professor  of  Systematic  Divinity,  and  the  Pro- 
fessor of  Ecclesiastical  History,  in  the  Divinity  School  of 
the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in  Philadelphia. 

"In  case  either  of  said  offices  are  vacant,  the  others 
may  nominate  the  lecturer." 

Under  this  trust,  the  Right  Rev.  F.  D.  Huntington, 
S.T.D.,  Bishop  of  the  Diocese  of  Central  New  York,  was 
appointed  to  deliver  the  lectures  for  the  year  1878. 

Philadelphia,  Easter-,  1878. 


CONTENTS. 


LECTURE     I. 

PAGE 

Christ  AMONG  Men:   His  Approach  the  Human  Heart,      7 


LECTURE     IL 

Christ   Declared  to   Men  of  a  False  Religious  Cul- 
ture.    St.  Paul  at  Athens, 37 

LECTURE     HL 

Christ  in  the  Presence  of  Doubt  and  Disbelief.     The 
World  without  Him,  and  with  Him,        .        .        .65 

LECTURE    IV. 

The    Religion    of  Christ  in    the    Power  of  Action  : 
ITS  Appeal  to  the  Human  Will,        .        .        .        .97 


LECTURE    I. 


©Txrist  am0U0  ^Xtu:  Jtis  ^ppxoKcU 


••S:|)c  SMl^ortK  toas  maUe  fles!),  anti  litocit  anions  us.** 

St.  John  i  :  14. 

•'33ut  Scsus    .    .    .    kneUj  all  men,  antr  nceUetr  not  t!)at  an© 
s?;oulii  testify  of  man ;  for  J^z  knm  b)!)at  teas  in  man." 

St.  John  2:24,  25. 

'*  eanto  i)ou,  ®  men,  fi  rail;  anti  mo  boice  is  to  tlje  sons  of  man.*' 

Proverbs  8:4. 


Orixrist  am0ttg  l^jetx : 


HIS   APPROACH   TO   THE   HUMAN   HEART. 

*'  Unto  you,  O  men,  I  call ;  and  my  voice  is  to 
,  the  sons  of  man."  The  voice  travels  down  from 
I  a  region  outside  of  nature.  The  *'  Wisdom"  that 
is  speaking  speaks  to  Humanit}^  but  is  not  of  it. 
"  I  was  set  up  from  everlasting,  from  the  begin- 
ning, or  ever  the  earth  was."  In  the  grand  per- 
sonification Hebrew  ideas  are  beginning  to  take 
the  form  and  color  of  the  Greek,  the  Greek  not 
only  of  the  Platonists  but  of  St.  John.  But  be- 
hind the  Hebrew  "  vision,"  which  has  given  light 
to  every  later  age  of  the  world,  and  behind  the 
Greek  thought,  which  has  really  given  law  to 
its  intellectual  life,  there  is  a  Avorld,  having  in  it 
.  the  Fountain  of  all  light  and  thought  and  law. 
^  Out  of  that  comes  the  voice.  In  the  awful  bur- 
den of  its  meaning  it  is  mysterious ;  but  in  its 
language  it  is  like  the  speech  of  a  mother  calling 
her  child  :  "  Hearken  unto  me,  O  ye  children  ;  O 
ye  simple,  understand."  Solomon  was  a  king  and 
knew  men ;  but  something  rang  through  his  soul, 
not  of  his  crown  or  his  court,  which  said,  "  By 
me  kings  reign, — and  princes,  and  nobles,  and 
judges;"  and  then  it  said,  "  I  love  them  that  love 
me,  and  those  that  seek  me  early  shall  find  me." 


8  ECTURE    FIRST. 


*'  Before  the  mountains  were  settled,  when  He  pre- 
pared the  heavens,  I  was  there.  Whoso  findeth 
me  findeth  Ufe" — of  all  you  *'  sons  of  men."  A 
thousand  and  seventy  3^ears  after,  a  son  of  a  Gali- 
lean sailor,  having  left  his  fishing-net  to  bleach  on 
the  sand,  wrote  the  life  of  *'  the  Son  of  man."  It 
begins  in  this  way :  *'  In  the  beginning  was  the 
Word,  and  the  Word  was  with  God,  and  the 
Word  was  God.  In  him  was  life ;  and  the  life 
was  the  light  of  men."  Wisdom,  the  voice  said, 
crieth  at  the  entry  of  the  city,  at  the  coming  in  at 
the  doors:  "My  delights  were  with  the  sons  of 
men."  St.  John  writes,  in  the  proem  of  his  Gospel, 
*' The  Word  was  made  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  w^r 
The  point,  dropping  out  of  account  here  any 
difference  between  the  Hebrew  and  the  Greek 
dress  of  the  thought,  is,  that  in  the  universe,  or 
whole  reality  of  things,  the  two  spheres,  natural 
and  supernatural,  are  equally  real;  in  both  of 
them  there  is  life ;  they  open  into  one  another ; 
life  passes,  in  persons,  from  one  to  the  other  ; 
both  are  for  men ;  and  the  one  living  bond  of 
unity,  whose  hfe  and  light  are  common  to  both 
ahke  is  '^The  Word."  Whether  in  the  Jewish 
mind,  which  was  not  metaphysical,  or  in  Gnostic 
speculation,  *'  Wisdom "  corresponded  best  with 
the  second  or  third  person  in  the  Christian  Trinity 
is  not  material.  The  Wisdom  of  God  coming  down 
to  the  earth  is  a  divine  Man,  seen  by  St.  John, — the 
man  of  men,  who  raises  humanity  to  heaven.  The 
more  we  think  this  thought,  and  trace  it  through 
its  relations,  the  more  we  shall  find  it  to  signify 
*'  the  faith  that  was  once  delivered  to  the  saints." 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN. 


9 


By  one  of  these  ''saints,"  if  we  use  the 
name  in  its  original  sense,  and  for  the  defence  of 
that  ''faith"  this  lectureship  Avas  founded.  His 
own  manhood  having  been  fashioned  and  perme- 
ated by  its  power,  when  his  ripe  mind  looked 
over  from  the  one  world  into  the  other,  he  re- 
membered the  great  inheritance  of  Christendom, 
Revelation : — the  trust  itself,  which  is  the  faith 
deposited ;  the  trust-deeds,  or  Christian  docu- 
ments ;  the  trusteeship,  in  an  imperishable  church. 
This  rose  before  him,  as  it  had  risen  first  within  him, 
the  one  immortal  benefit  of  man.  His  surviving 
representatives,  shaping  his  general  and  liberal 
design,  have  directed  it  by  the  terms  of  the 
Bampton  Foundation  at  Oxford.  The  first  words 
of  John  Bampton,  Canon  of  Salisbury,  defining 
his  plan,  were  these  : — "  To  confirm  and  establish 
the  Christian  faith."  I  am  left  in  no  doubt  at  all, 
therefore,  what  is  given  me  now  to  do.  In  the 
bounds  of  that  comprehensive  purpose  I  find 
room  enough  to  move  with  liberty,  not  reaching 
beyond  it,  but  choosing  and  following  a  particu- 
lar line  within  it.  Two  questions  must  be  kept 
straight  before  us  all  the  way.  There  are 
believers,  and  there  are  deniers.  So  far  as  men 
believe,  can  their  belief  be  made  more  definite,  and 
by  being  more  definite  be  stronger,  and  by  being 
stronger  be  more  serviceable  to  the  world  ?  So 
far  as  the  age  denies  or  doubts,  how  is  faith  to 
win  back  the  skeptic  to  her  side,  naturalizing  him 
in  her  house,  and  training  there  a  race  of  sons 
and  daughters  as  believing  and  as  brave  as  any 
that  have  ever  lived  and  died  ?     These  are  ques- 


lO  LECTURE    FIRST. 

tions  for  the  understanding,  and  to  your  under- 
standing the  appeal  must  principally  lie.  Heart 
and  hands,  I  know,  have  their  office,  in  this  nine- 
teenth century  apostleship,  of  regaining  in  America 
a  rationalizing  Athens,  a  sensual  Corinth,  a  law- 
worshipping  Rome,  and  a  ritual  Jerusalem,  to  the 
hoty  freedom  of  the  Son  of  God.  Infidelity  is  as 
often  converted,  I  think,  in  any  land  or  time,  by 
sympathy  as  by  scholarship,  by  practical  good- 
ness as  by  processes  of  the  mind,  and  I  hope  we 
shall  see  that  distinctly,  if  you  go  on  with  me  in 
order.  But  here  it  is  for  the  study  of  a  subject 
that  you  meet,  and  it  is  on  your  understanding 
that  you  will  expect  me  to  lay  such  thoughts  as  I 
can  bring. 

My  plan  is  this.  We  start  with  ourselves  as 
we  are.  You  and  I  are  the  beginning  of  the 
argument.  It  is  a  plain  postulate.  The  axiom 
is  safe ;  for  neither  Dr.  Strauss  nor  Blanco 
White,  Professor  Huxley  nor  Matthew  Arnold 
denies  himself  to  be.  This  little  personal  domain, 
the  "  I  myself,"  may  not  be  a  thing  very  scientifi- 
cally apprehended  ;  but  with  all  its  complexity  it 
is  familiar,  and  every  fibre  is  sensitive.  Outside, 
objective  to  this  living  thing,  confronting  it,  a 
voice  calling  to  it,  searching  it,  commanding  it,  is 
what  we  call  Christianity.  It  is  more  than  a  voice 
— a  substantive  force,  the  kingdom  of  God,  a  rule 
of  life,  a  creed  offered  to  belief — ''  one  spirit  and 
one  body."  We  have,  then,  man,  and  we  have  a 
Gospel.  What  I  propose,  with  the  help  of  your 
attention,  is  to  prove  the  fitness  of  these  two  to 
one  another,   each  to   each.     We   undertake   to 


CHRIST   AMONG   MEN.  \  \ 

show  that  the  Gospel  is  to  be  believed  because  it 
is  suited  to  man.  Whatever  materials  of  illustra- 
tion may  be  gathered  from  outward  nature,  from 
books,  from  society,  from  history,  the  sinew  and 
strength  of  the  demonstration  are  in  yourselves. 
This  gives  me  great  advantage.  The  proposi- 
tion is,  The  CJiristian  faith  is  found  to  be  true  by  its 
adaptation  to  mankind.  Man  wants  it  in  his  consti- 
tution, grows  and  ripens  in  every  faculty  by  its 
supplies,  and  comes  to  the  measure  of  the  stature 
of  his  perfection  only  by  the  working  in  him  of 
its  power.  If  man  is  authentic,  so  is  the  Christian 
revelation.  If  man  has  a  legitimate  place  in  the 
universe,  the  Gospel  has  a  place  there  with  him, 
by  the  same  right. 

The  Chinese  student  in  the  study  of  Bishop 
Boone,  representing  intelligent  humanity  at  its 
farthest  modern  remove  from  Christ,  speaks  the 
irresistible  verdict  of  the  race.  He  was  a  teacher 
among  his  Pagan  countrymen,  and  Avas  taken 
into  the  mission-family  to  learn  English  and 
translate  the  Bible  into  the  Celestial  tongue. 
For  a  long  time  he  remained  insensible  to  any 
thing  in  the  Scriptures  but  their  literary  beauty. 
Abruptly,  one  day,  he  rose  from  his  manuscripts, 
with  the  New  Testament  open  in  his  hand,  and, 
with  the  rapid  manner  of  one  who  has  been  star- 
tled by  a  great  discovery,  he  exclaimed,  ''  Who- 
ever made  this  book  made  me.  It  knows  all  that 
is  in  my  heart.  It  tells  me  what  no  one  but  a 
God  can  know  about  me.  Whoever  made  me 
made  that  book."  What  is  true  of  the  book  is 
true  of  him  who  is  its  life.     Whoever  made  you 


12  LECTURE    FIRST. 

a  man,  and  me,  is  m  Christ,  reconciling  us  to  him- 
self. 

Some  special  grounds  for  this  affirmation  will 
be  presented  by  way  of  introduction,  to-night, 
found  in  the  person  of  our  Lord,  his  personal 
attraction  to  men,  and  his  personal  sway  over 
them  as  they  are  everywhere.  After  that  there 
will  be  three  further  divisions  of  the  main  subject, 
answering  to  three  elements  that  are  in  this 
human  nature,  essential  to  it  everywhere,  and 
conspicuous  in  proportion  as  it  rises  from  barbar- 
ism. First,  we  shall  see  man  as  a  worshipping 
creature,  with  a  believing  capacity,  and  in  the 
loftiest  conditions  of  human  culture,  but  Avithout 
revelation,  as  Paul  found  him  at  Athens,  swing- 
ing between  atheism  and  superstition  ;  then  as  an 
understanding  creature,  with  a  capacity  for 
knowledge,  and  at  the  same  time  capable  of  set- 
ting his  knowing  faculty  against  belief;  then  as  a 
creature  of  action,  with  the  power  of  will,  organ- 
ized for  enterprise  and  the  conquest  of  nature,  as 
he  rises  in  the  Roman  and  western  world.  Liv- 
ing questions  or  issues,  you  Avill  see,  fresh  to 
the  interest  of  the  times  we  are  living  in,  stand 
near  by,  along  the  whole  course  of  that  fourfold 
inquiry :  the  question  of  faith  and  reason  in  order- 
ing life,  of  spirit  and  form  in  worship,  of  secular- 
ism and  religion  in  education,  of  individualism 
and  organic  force  in  spiritual  movements  to 
evangehze  mankind,  and  of  the  relations  of  the 
principles  of  science  to  the  growth  of  the  king- 
dom of  God  in  the  soul.  Through  these  four  ave- 
nues, if  the  Spirit  of  wisdom  and  of  power  conde- 


CHRIST   AMONG   MEN. 


13 


scends  to  guide  us  in  so  holy  a  study,  may  some 
truth  and  some  charity  enter  in  and  dwell ! 

When  the  heavens  were  opened  down,  in  the 
vision  of  Patmos,  we  are  told  of  the  descending 
city,  perfect  and  everlasting,  from  God  and  for 
man,  having  him  who  is  God  and  man  for  its 
eternal  light,  that  *'  the  city  lieth  foursquare," 
gates  open  on  every  side,  the  nations  bringing 
their  glory  and  honor  into  it :  "  foursquare," 
*'  the  length,  the  breadth  and  the  height  of  it 
equal." 

This  evening  I  lay  before  you  three  or  four 
traits  of  Christ's  Religion,  closely  connected  with 
each  other,  which  Xvhen  they  are  fairly  seen, 
stripped  of  every  thing  that  disguises  or  disfig- 
ures them,  take  a  natural  hold  of  human  confi- 
dence. Hitherto,  for  the  greater  part,  in  the  eastern 
and  western  theolog}^  the  battle  has  been  fought 
on  one  or  another  of  six  fields — the  biblical  writ- 
ings as  a  book,  their  critical  sense,  their  moral 
value,  prophecy,  miracle,  and  ecclesiastical  au- 
thority. What  lies  outside  of  these  lines,  in  the 
patristic,  Galilean,  German,  and  Anglican  apolo- 
getics, important  as  it  often  is,  is  rather  incidental 
than  principal.  Apologetics  is  the  science  of  the 
defence  of  the  faith.  The  word  is  to  be  divested 
in  your  minds  of  the  enfeebling  impression  that 
attaches  to  the  idea  of  an  "apology,"  in  popular 
use,  as  if  Christianity  offered  an  excuse  for  its 
coming,  or  asked  leave  to  be.  The  truth  is,  the 
Church  waited  for  attack  before  it  offered  a  de- 
fence. It  arose,  on  the  earth,  visibly,  from  Bethle- 
hem, Calvary,  and  the  broken  sepulchre ;  but  it 


14  LECTURE    FIRST. 

was  actually  planted  downward  from  heaven,  and 
stood,  a  positive  institution,  on  three  continents, 
holding  a  document  in  its  hand  which  has  never 
been  wrenched  out  of  it,  witnessing  to  a  Christ 
who  dwells  within  it,  and  working  not  only  in  his 
spoken  name  but  by  his  ///-working  poAver.  Its 
attitude  was  affirmative,  not  negative.  Its  creed 
was  shorter  and  simpler  even  than  noAV,  till  the 
days  of  Nicaea  and  Constantinople  enlarged  the 
statement,  completed  the  definition,  and  handed 
over  the  symbol  to  after-ages.  It  had  one  article 
— Jesus  Christ  of  Nazareth,  the  Son  of  God  and 
the  Saviour  of  the  world.  Denial,  heresy,  objec- 
tion— born  as  much  of  monastic  speculation  in  the 
cave,  and  mysticism  in  the  desert,  where  burrow- 
ing eremites  bored  and  carved  the  rocks  into 
mountainous  honeycombs,  as  of  humanity  earnest- 
ly facing  the  problems  of  life  and  duty,  where 
wisdom  cried  at  the  entry  of  the  city  and  by 
the  paths  of  men — challenged  the  orthodox  belief. 
Then  began  the  great  labor  of  the  apologists  and 
defenders.  There  must  now  be  negation  of  error 
as  it  is  in  Arian,  Gnostic,  and  Ebionite,  as  well  as 
affirmation  of  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus.  From 
that  time  forth  the  walls  have  been  manned,  the 
gates  have  been  kept,  the  colors  have  not  sunk, 
the  city  of  God  still  stands;  and  the  conflicts  have 
been  waged  chiefly  on  the  six  areas  that  I  have 
named. 

But,  after  all — and  this  is  what  I  venture  to 
think  has  been  sometimes  forgotten — in  every  one 
of  these  lines  of  argument,  human  nature,  after  the 
Christ  revealed,  is  the  principal  factor  concerned. 


CHRIST   AMONG    MEN.  I  5 

You  argue  for  revelation,  that  it  is  authentic,  that 
it  is  genuine,  that  it  is  self-consistent.     By  what 
instrument,  then,  is  your  argument  measured,  and 
weighed,   and   your   proof    tested,    but    by    the 
reason   of   a   man  ?     How  does   your   revelation 
''tell?"     Where   does   it  enter?     On   what  sub- 
stance does   it  strike  ?     What  is   its  termhiiis  ad 
qiiem  ?     Plainly,   whencesoever    it    proceeds,   by 
whatever  path  it  has  arrived,  or  by  whatever  cre- 
dentials it  certifies  its  errand,  its  object   is  the 
heart   of   man.     For   him,  for   you,  the   heavens 
were  parted,  the  voice  spoke,  the  prophet  fore- 
told, the  miracle  amazed  the  witnesses,  the  cross 
Avas  set  up,  the  two  Testaments  were  recorded. 
Those  "  saints"  to  whom  the  faith  was  once  for 
all  delivered  were  human  saints,  men  like  these 
here  now.     There  Avas  something  ''  delivered,"  to 
be  sure,  that  men  must  apprehend,  judge  of,  take 
in  by  intellectual  reception,  and  hold  by  faculties 
which,  having  once  grasped  it,  can  defend  it ;  and 
then  there   is  something  else,  another  element,  in 
this  revelation,  which  men  must  seize,  if  they  are 
to  have  it  at  all,  by  another  capacity — a  receptiv- 
ity in  them  not  of  reason  only  but  of  spiritual 
sympathy,  an  answer  of  the  affections,  a  reaching 
out  of  desire,  a   welcome   into  the  heart.     It  is 
that  something  in  the  religion  of  Christ  of  which 
man  says,  "  This  is  for  me  ;  this  I  must  have,  be- 
cause it  meets  my  want,  fills  my  hunger,   helps 
me  when  I  am  weak,  saves  me  when  I  know  I  am 
in  peril,  and  gives  me  peace  where  no  peace  was ; 
it  suits  me ;  it  is  mine."     Will  it  not  be,  then,  for 
the  honor  of  the  faith,  for  the  confirmation  of  it  in 


1 6  LECTURE  FIRST. 

those  who  have  a  little  and  can  say,  ''  Lord,  I  be- 
lieve, help  thou  mine  unbelief,"  for  the  creating 
of  it  possibly  in  some  who  have  refused  it  because 
they  have  not  seen  it  as  it  is,  if  we  can  once  behold 
its  fitness  to  our  whole  nature  as  we  are  ? 

I.  Notice,  as  pointing  in  this  direction,  at  the 
outset,  that  before  the  Gospel  was  committed  to 
Scriptures,  to  a  dogmatic  or  philosophical  sys- 
tem, or  to  any  organization  or  institution  what- 
ever, it  was  committed  to  men,  or  to  man  as  man. 
The  beginnings  of  Christendom  are  seen  in  the 
last  half  of  the  first  chapter  of  St.  John.  A  story 
more  intensely  and  simply  human  is  not  found  in 
any  literature.  With  the  resources  of  heaven  and 
earth  at  his  command,  the  Founder  of  an  empire 
which  was  to  lift  itself  over  the  throne  of  the 
Caesars,  and  outlast  every  structure  under  the 
sun,  spoke  to  a  few  persons  in  the  most  absolutely 
human  of  all  conditions,  employments,  relation- 
ships. Into  these  persons  he  put  the  kingdom  of 
heaven.  For  a  long  time  he  was  apparently  ut- 
terly indifferent  whether  the  Gospel  ever  took 
any  other  shape  than  in  the  life  of  a  society  of 
men.  When  his  neighbors  and  countr3^men  arose 
and  followed  him,  they  recognized  in  him  no 
other  character  than  that  of  an  extraordinary 
man.  It  was,  in  fact,  humanity  in  its  most  naked 
condition.  Without  education,  without  patron- 
age, without  pedigree,  without  flattery,  without 
policy,  without  an  army,  without  property, 
coming  out  of  a  village  whose  very  name  cov- 
ered him  with  contempt,  speaking  unpopular 
words,  crossing  the  prejudices  of  his  people,  of- 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN. 


17 


fending  rulers,  alone,  misunderstood,  this  man 
rose  into  a  permanent  and  immeasurable  mastery 
over  every  thinking-  and  strong  nation  on  the 
earth.  Among  all  the  phenomena  of  history  this 
is  absolutely  alone  in  majesty,  in  mystery.  So 
far  as  we  are  informed,  he  never  wrote  a  sen- 
tence, or  ordered  a  sentence  to  be  written,  except 
when  he  stooped  and  traced  on  the  ground  some 
words  that  any  passing  human  foot  would  tread 
out,  or  the  next  rainfall  wash  away.  Years 
passed  before  one  chapter  of  the  New  Testament 
was  recorded  on  paper  or  parchment.  He  never 
hinted  that  a  body  of  doctrinal  divinity  was  any 
part  of  his  apparatus  for  converting  or  redeem- 
ing the  world.  Yet  all  this  while  the  entire  gift 
of  the  Gospel  and  grace  of  his  mediation  was 
alive,  and  Avas  at  work  among  men  born  of  wo- 
men. Could  there  be  a  more  striking  sign  luhere 
he  meant  the  primal  attestations  of  his  truth  to  be 
sought  ? 

The  Bible  was  to  come.  The  place  for  it  was 
provided  beforehand  in  a  Christly  and  a  churchly 
providence.  And  when  it  should  come  its  au- 
thority was  to  be  supreme — all  ecclesiastical 
councils,  creeds,  standards,  to  be  regulated  by  its 
unchanging  solar  light,  as  sundials  by  the  sun. 
No  man,  no  society  of  men,  not  the  church,  east 
or  west,  can  touch  this  finished  and  sufficient 
Word,  to  add  one  text,  to  take  away  a  syllable,  to 
alter  an  idea,  any  more  than  they  can  all  manu- 
facture a  ministry  or  create  a  sacrament.  And 
yet,  in  the  order  of  the  creating  and  inspiring 
Spirit,  the  kingdom  of  God  on  the  earth  came 


1 8  LECTURE    FIRST. 

from  the  Son  of  man,  not  first  out  of  a  book  into 
men,  but  out  of  men  into  the  book.  There  is 
a  profound  meaning  in  a  saying  of  Mr.  Coleridge, 
that  we  know  the  Bible  to  be  inspired  ''  because 
it  finds  man."  Were  it  ever  to  cease  to  find  him, 
it  would  drop  from  the  hand  of  our  race  like  a 
withered  leaf ;  for  then,  either  on  the  volume  of 
the  book,  or  on  the  heart  of  his  child,  the  Al- 
mighty himself  would  have  let  go  his  hold. 

This  Master  teaches.  In  any  account  of  his 
speech,  by  evangelist  or  tradition,  there  is  no 
attributing  of  his  attraction  to  what  is  called 
eloquence — only  to  the  matter  of  his  conversa- 
tions and  the  impressions  of  his  person.  Yet  such 
is  his  mysterious  sway  that  boats  are  forsaken  on 
the  shore  by  fishermen,  custom-house  officers 
turn  from  their  tax-tables,  and  a  procession  of  fol- 
lowers begins  to  move  along  the  rural  streets, 
w^hich  lengthens  and  widens,  through  countries 
and  centuries,  till  it  swells  to  four  hundred  mil- 
lions of  living  men  at  a  time.  There  is  only  one 
possible  explanation.  He  touches  something  inside 
the  Jiuinan  heart  zvJiicJi  ivas  zvaiting  to  be  touched. 
What  else  is  meant  when  he  is  called  *' the  Desire 
of  all  nations"  ? 

It  is  said  the  common  people  were  his  glad 
hearers — and  by  common  people  are  not  meant 
dull  people,  or  vulgar,  or  illiterate,  or  unclean 
people,  but  people  who  have  in  them,  with  least 
overlaying,  what  is  common  to  man. 

Take  one  of  the  constant  topics  of  his  preach- 
ing. On  the  pages  that  report  it  you  find  scarce- 
ly any  word   more   conspicuous  than  the  word 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN.  1 9 

*'  life."  He  brings,  he  offers,  he  promises,  he 
gives  hfe.  ''  I  am  come  that  they  might  have 
hfe,  and  might  have  it  more  abundantly."  Now, 
except  in  the  rare  triumph  of  some  commanding 
passion,  or  in  the  terrible  collapse  of  despair,  men 
fear  and  fight  aad  hate  death.  Christ  is  born 
of  a  dying  race.  Unless  he  is  stronger,  death  is 
the  one  universal  king,  and  will  conquer  him  as  it 
conquers  every  man  at  last.  But  men  do  not 
want  to  die  ;  they  want  to  live.  Christ  meets 
them  and  tells  them,  ''  You  may  stop  dying,  who- 
soever will,  and  begin  to  live  forever.  The  life  is 
in  me,  imperishable,  eternal.  Join  yourself  to 
me,  be  one  with  me,  and  this  life  flows  into 
you,  and  lo !  death  is  abolished."  The  physical 
change  remains  ;  but  it  is  not  what  you  knew 
as  death.  The  coffin  crumbles — not  your  child, 
your  mother,  your  friend.  The  pulse  stops — not 
thought.  One  kind  of  fabric  dissolves,  but  from 
its  ashes  there  is  immortal  beauty — a  spiritual 
body.  ''  Whosoever  liveth  and  believeth  in  me 
shall  never  die."  You  wanted  to  live,  and  live 
you  may.  A  few  believed  it  on  his  word.  He 
died  and  rose,  and  the  faith  was  never  to  forsake 
the  heart  of  humanity  again.  No  teacher  ever 
filled  that  universal  and  mighty  longing  for  life 
but  Christ. 

Again,  the  law  that  matches  life  is  love.  Man 
is  not  separable  from  the  social  instinct.  Spite  of 
selfishness  and  care  and  greed  and  slavery,  he 
seeks  his  fellow,  he  clings  to  his  kind,  he  builds  a 
home,  he  is  stronger  for  the  touch  of  another's 
hand.     Can  a  blind  instinct  like  that  be  turned 


20  LECTURE    FIRST. 

into  a  clear-sighted  and  triumphant  principle  ? 
Where  is  the  wonder-worker  that  can  transmute 
a  fickle  sentiment,  which  every  appetite  or  insult 
can  degrade,  into  a  force  so  majestic  and  so  beau- 
tiful that  it  shall  heal  the  misery  of  every  mortal 
pain,  and  bind  its  illuminated  children  into  a 
brotherhood  outreaching  the  bounds  of  interest 
or  nationality  ?  That  brotherhood  Christ  creates. 
By  that  principle  he  plants  and  builds  a  church. 
He  clears  the  sweet  force  of  every  bitter  ingredi- 
ent and  every  belittling  limitation.  He  sends  it 
over  the  earth  from  his  cross,  and,  as  the  charity 
of  the  Gospel,  it  transfigures  the  face  of  the 
world  by  regenerating  its  heart.  Not  Confucius, 
or  Zoroaster,  or  Buddha,  or  Mohammed,  or  Soc- 
rates, or  Marcus  Aurelius,  or  Shakespeare  does 
this.  Another  deep  and  broad  "  desire"  of  man 
is  met  by  the  Son  of  man  alone. 

Again,  humanity,  naked  and  near  to  the  earth 
as  you  please,  wants  conscious  reconciliation  with 
a  power  above  itself.  Travellers  and  sailors  have 
now  uncovered  the  globe.  We  know  what  sorts 
of  super-brutal  animals  it  holds.  There  is  no  hid- 
den type  left  to  be  dragged  to  light.  The  fact  is 
public  that  propitiation  is  a  cosmopolitan  idea,  not 
Jewish  only  but  ethnic,  with  exceptions  too  insig- 
nificant to  be  reckoned.  Man  wants  to  be  forgiven. 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  first  carrying  the  conceptions 
of  men  to  their  highest  mark  by  his  own  life  and 
lips,  embodying  a  visible  divinity  in  his  three 
and  thirty  years,  till  no  explanation  of  his  human 
character  can  be  found  except  in  the  irresistible 
confession    of    his    title     **  Emmanuel,"    suffers. 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN.  21 

*'  One  man  dies  for  the  people,"  the  magnificent 
oracle  of  a  redeemed  creation  from  calculating 
Caiaphas*  diplomatic  tongue.  Never  before  or 
since,  never  anywhere  else,  was  God  seen  in 
sacrifice.  Yet  that  was  the  one  secret  glory 
which  not  only  Simeons  in  the  temple  but  Mag- 
dalens  in  tears  had  wanted  to  see,  ever  since  the 
flaming  swords  on  the  gate  of  Eden  had  closed 
the  hope  of  a  natural  return  to  innocence.  And 
now,  will  that  sacrificial  sign  of  forgiveness  be  so 
trusted  that  another  universal  longing  shall  be 
filled,  and  mankind  have  the  Saviour  they  desired, 
from  humanity  at  its  highest  to  humanity  at  its 
worst  ?  Look  high  and  look  low.  Take  extremes 
of  humanity  so  wide  apart  that  between  them 
there  shall  be  room  for  every  human  grade  and 
pattern.  Down  by  the  slimy  edges  of  Indian 
jungles,  down  along  the  swamps  of  Congo,  down 
in  the  dimness  of  Dakota,  not  one  but  many  thou- 
sands, some  of  them  made  heroes  and  martyrs, 
have  said  or  sung,  "  The  blood  of  Jesus  Christ 
cleanseth  us  from  all  sin,"  and  have  risen  into 
clean  Hves  and  the  liberty  of  righteousness.  We 
look  from  the  bottom  of  the  world  to  the  top.  A 
line  of  the  loftiest  intellects  that  have  led  the  cul- 
ture and  progress  of  the  race  beckon  down  to  us 
from  their  battlements  ;  the  Augustines  and  Chry- 
sostoms,  the  Raphaels  and  Newtons,  the  Faradays 
and  Keplers  and  Bunsens  of  science,  of  reason 
and  of  art,  and  they  say,  ''  Not  unto  us."  There 
is  one  mind,  by  common  consent,  in  compass,  in 
creativeness,  in  height  and  breadth  and  uncon- 
scious power  occupying  a  place  among  them  that 


2  2  LECTURE    FIRST. 

is  like  a  throne.  In  Shakespeare  s  last  will,  when 
the  eye  that  had  ranged  through  nature  was  lifted 
to  the  heavens,  he  wrote  this :  *'  I  commend  my 
soul  into  the  hands  of  God,  my  creator ;  hoping 
and  assuredly  believing,  through  the  only  merits 
of  Jesus  Christ,  my  Saviour,  to  be  made  partaker 
of  life  everlasting."  I  think  we  shall  conclude 
there  are  no  ranges  of  man's  mind  where  the 
hunger  for  pardon,  as  well  as  for  life  and  for  love, 
is  not  satisfied  in  the  faith  of  Christ. 

It  may  be  said  that  the  purpose  of  the  Gospel 
is  the  invigoration  of  humanity.  What  more 
conclusive  certification  could  it  have  ?  Horrible 
travesties  there  have  been,  I  know,  even  by  its 
friends,  of  that  benignant  movement  of  heaven 
towards  man.  Irrational  piety  has  put  upon  it 
incredible  imputations,  and  held  them  up  as  its 
title  to  honor.  But  can  any  candid  critic  dis- 
pute this  declaration?  To  every  element  and 
faculty  that  properly  belongs  to  universal  man 
Christ  imparts  a  quickening,  empowering,  enlarg- 
ing energy.  The  argument  becomes  very  close. 
That  which  invigorates  every  force,  harmonizes 
with  every  law,  and  bears  towards  perfection 
every  quality  of  the  nature  it  salutes,  must  be 
true  to  that  nature. 

II,  From  these  instances  of  his  teachings  turn 
to  the  Teacher  himself.  In  this  respect  Christiani- 
ty stands  absolutely  original  and  alone ;  that  from 
end  to  end,  as  spirit,  as  doctrine,  as  law,  as  life,  it 
is  embodied  in  a  person.  Christianity  is  Christ. 
He,  not  his  words,  not  his  ideas,  not  his  prin- 
ciples, primarily,  but  HE  is  the  substance  of  his 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN, 


23 


religion.  To  have  Jiiui^  as  one  person  may  have 
another,  by  faith,  by  one  hfe  flowing  into  another 
life,  is  the  essential  character  of  a  disciple.  All 
Christian  knowledge  is  the  knowledge  of  him. 
All  Christian  growth  is  growing  up  into  him. 
All  ''  progress"  is  progress  into  his  boundless 
grace  and  immaculate  holiness.  "  He  that  hath 
the  Son  hath  life."  See  the  intensity  of  the 
humanity.  You  talk  of  a  "  Gospel  of  to-day,"  as 
if  days  had  gospels  !  The  religion  of  yesterday, 
the  religion  of  to-day,  and  the  religion  of  the 
future  forever,  are  the  same  religion,  because  he, 
the  person,  is  yesterday,  to-day,  forever,  the 
same,  not  parting  with  his  identity.  Think  of  this, 
you  men,  when  you  hear  dreamers  in  the  night 
babbling  of  a  ''  religion  of  the  age,"  as  if  ages 
made  religions,  or  originated  revelations,  and 
did  not  themselves  all  lie  like  straining  but  com- 
forted children  in  the  mighty  arms  of  the  ever- 
lasting wisdom  and  love  of  the  Lord ! 

We  speak  complacently  of  our  ''  times,"  our 
"age,"  our  ''day."  Well,  then,  what  day  is  it? 
What  do  we  say  when  we  Avould  fix  the  place  of 
this  self-congratulating  era?  We  say,  it  is  the 
nineteenth  century,  or  we  say,  it  is  the  year  one 
thousand  eight  hundred  and  seventy-eight.  Have 
you  thought,  you  sons  of  men,  how  you  came  to 
reckon  so?  It  is  the  nineteenth  century  after 
what  ?  It  is  eighteen  hundred  and  seventy-eight 
years  si7tce  when  ?  I  open  Mr.  Tyndall's  lectures, 
Mr.  Stuart  Mill's  essays,  Comte's  positive  philo- 
sophy, which  would  have  us  believe,  if  they  could, 
that    Christianity    was    a    temporary    phase    of 


24  LECTURE    FIRST. 

superstitious  speculation,  and  they  date  their 
books  this  way,  like  the  rest  of  us.  It  means  that, 
in  the  inmost  and  awful  sense  of  men,  all  the  his- 
tory and  all  the  life  of  all  the  nations  strong  in 
brain  and  strong  in  arm,  turn  about  one  supreme 
and  central  and  glorious  person ;  the  advent  and 
redemption  of  the  Son  of  man,  who  is  the  Son  of 
God.  His  entrance  is  the  one  great  hour  of  time. 
As  often  as  you  w^rite  those  figures  that  mark  the 
year  of  the  Lord,  believer  or  unbeliever,  on  your 
day-book,  or  bill  of  sale,  or  title-deed,  or  letter, 
you  write  the  concession  of  the  world  to  the 
creed  of  Christendom.  Sciences  and  arts  are 
progressive  in  their  nature,  because  their  elements 
and  materials  lie  in  shifting  and  struggling  minds, 
or  in  beds  of  matter  whence  they  are  gradually 
drawn,  as  experiment  and  discovery  accumulate 
their  tools.  Christianity  is  not  progressive,  be- 
cause Christianity  is  Christ — absolute  life,  human- 
ity perfect,  and  unchangeably  divine. 

In  the  fourth  century  before  Christ  there 
appeared  at  Athens  two  men,  master  and  pupil, 
who  in  two  diverging  directions  gave  an  extraor- 
dinary impulse  to  the  thinking  faculty  of  mankind, 
and  to  knowledge  ;  an  impulse  that  has  never  3^et 
been  spent.  They  gathered  up  all  that  the  world 
had  found  out  before  in  the  two  great  depart- 
ments of  matter  and  mind,  physics  and  meta- 
physics, reduced  it  to  order,  and,  by  pure  intel- 
lectual force,  one  as  a  logician,  the  other  as  an 
idealist,  may  be  said  to  have  moulded  the  mental 
character  of  scholars  from  that  time  on  ;  the  two 
great   schools  of  thought  they  led — nominalists 


CHRIST  AMONG   MEN.  25 

and  realists — being  traceable  down  through  all 
the  early  Christian  and  middle  ages,  and  to 
our  own  time.  Even  now,  language,  literature, 
philosophy,  theology — and  consider  how  much 
these  four  names  include  ! — show  the  stamp  of 
their  commanding  genius.  They  have  both 
largely  influenced  the  intellectual  side  of  the  life 
of  the  Church.  But  these  two  men,  Aristotle 
and  Plato,  did  not  embody  their  respective  sys- 
tems. They  did  not  incarnate  the  two  philoso- 
phies in  any  such  way  that  you  will  not  get  the 
whole  of  what  they  brought,  with  no  personal  re- 
lation to  the  men.  Scholars  from  all  the  Grecian 
schools  and  the  cities  of  the  East  sat  fascinated 
at  their  feet ;  and  any  one  of  them  might  be 
Aristotelian  or  Platonist  with  no  influence  Avhat- 
ever  from  the  life  of  either.  To  the  generations 
of  all  these  later  centuries  their  names  are  names, 
and  nothing  more.  The  intellectual  realm  of 
each  is  a  kingdom  without  a  king.  Four  hundred 
years  after  them  came  Christ.  His  system  and 
he  are  one.  It  is  the  person,  the  man  Christ 
Jesus,  that  is  preached,  and  fed  upon,  in  all  the 
Church.  To-night  many  millions  of  men  would 
die  for  their  love  of  him. 

I  said  that  there  was  no  parallel  for  this 
method  in  history.  China,  India,  Persia,  Egypt, 
Mediterranean  Europe,  all  had  their  religious 
systems.  No  one  of  them  rests  on  a  personal  or 
even  an  historical  basis.  None  of  them  can  be 
seen  in  the  life  of  a  character,  living,  as  Jesus 
lived,  in  the  daylight  of  a  well-known  historical 
period,  whose  biography  is  capable  of  being  tested 


2  6  LECTURE    FIRST. 

by  every  kind  of  historical  criterion.  They  are 
all  mythologies.  Mohammedanism,  to  be  sure, 
was  introduced  by  an  individual.  But  Mo- 
hammed himself  '*  claimed  no  special  relation- 
ship to  God,"  never  identified  his  character 
with  his  doctrine,  and  propagated  his  system 
by  military  force. 

Nobody  here  proposes,  I  presume,  to  compare 
the  Koran  with  the  New  Testament,  or  imagines 
that  Islamism  would  take  hold  of  any  other  than 
an  inferior,  unscientific,  sensuous  race.  Much  the 
same  might  be  said  of  Buddhism.  No  claim  is 
set  up  that  it  is  a  system  of  historical  realities, 
verified  by  historical  tests.  The  shadowy  ac- 
counts of  Sakyamani,  in  some  sense  the  founder 
of  Buddhism,  making  him  come  into  the  world  in 
the  form  of  a  white  elephant,  giving  him  twelve 
thousand  names  and  several  successive  births,  and 
enveloping  his  story  in  a  cloud  of  legendary  ex- 
travagance, are  as  utterly  unlike  the  sweet  and 
simple  narratives  of  the  Evangelists  as  the  doc- 
trines of  annihilation,  atheism,  and  despair,  which 
form  that  dreary  theology,  are  unlike  the  blessed 
teachings  of  the  Saviour's  mercy,  sacrifice,  and 
resurrection. 

One  of  the  conceits  of  the  most  recent  rational- 
ism has  been  to  bring  the  maxims  and  medita- 
tions of  the  Vedas  and  Zendavesta  into  the  rank 
of  the  spiritual  instructions  of  the  Gospel.  Sup- 
pose they  were  all  that  is  claimed  for  them, 
close  akin  to  the  Christian  ethics,  or  worthy  to 
be  compared  with  portions  of  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount,  what  have  they  done?     What  have 


CHRIST   AMONG   MEN.  2  J 

they  done  even  for^  the  foul,  cruel,  lazy  popula- 
tions that  have  received  them  ?  They  have  had 
those  sottish  communities  to  themselves  half  a 
thousand  years  longer  than  Christianity  has 
lived.  Buddha  and  Kung-fu-tse  have  had  no 
rivals  till  the  modern  missionary  preached  Christ, 
and  then  Hindostan  was  pierced  with  arrows  of 
light  in  less  than  ninety  years. 

There  is  a  curious  and  special  phenomenon  ex- 
actly to  the  purpose  of  my  argument.     A  promi- 
nent Hindoo  scholar,  the  son  of  a  Brahmin,  was 
born  in  Bengal  in  the  last  century,  and  died  in 
England  in  1833.     He  studied  Enghsh,  edited  an 
English  newspaper,  admired  the  Christian  litera- 
ture, and   intellectually  outgrew  the  mythology 
of  his  people.     His   notion  was  exactly  that  of 
some  of  our  native  American  Brahmins,  that  the 
strength   of  Christianity  lies  in   its    ethical  and 
religious  principles,  apart  from  its  superhuman 
energy  in  the  person,  incarnation,  life,  death,  and 
resurrection  of  the    Son    of   God.      Rammohun 
Roy  accordingly  published,  in  both  the  Bengalee 
and   English   languages,  extracts  from   the   four 
Gospels,  to  which  he  gave  the  title''  The  Precepts 
of  Jesus ;    a   Guide   to    Peace   and    Happiness." 
There  are  a  few  copies  of  that  volume  in  the  li- 
braries of  this  country,  but  probably  not  a  score 
of  my  auditors  ever  saw  it,  or  even  heard  of  its 
existence.     It  fell  on  the  strong,  warm,  passion- 
ate life  of  the  Eastern  world  like  a  crystal  snow- 
fliake  on  the  tropical  jungles.     Heavenly  truth  as 
it  all  was,  it   was   not  our  Gospel.     It  was  the 
voice  without  the  living  Lord,  the  moral  anatomy 


28  LECTURE    FIRST. 

of  the  new  faith,  emptied  of  its  beating  heart  and 
its  precious  blood. 

III.  I  offer  you  at  present  but  one  proof  more. 
We  pass  to  a  ground  of  confidence,  as  catholic 
believers,  far  beyond  the  possible  bounds  of  the 
old  apologies. 

You  are  the  sons  of  a  scientific  age.  It  is  the 
honor  of  real  science  that  she  faces  all  the  facts, 
makes  room  for  them,  and  accounts  for  them  if 
she  can.  We  claim  for  Revelation  a  place  in  the 
convictions  and  a  welcome  to  the  minds  of  mod- 
ern men,  the  most  scientific  included,  on  the  very 
principles  which  lie  at  the  foundation  of  all  sound 
scientific  inquiry.  The  Church  presents  to  sci- 
ence the  fact  of  Christendom,  We  say  it  is  as  wor- 
thy of  a  place  and  an  explanation  as  any  alkali  in 
your  crucibles,  any  bird-track  or  ornitholite  in 
the  sand.  Somewhere  that  immense  monument 
must  have  had  a  builder  over  it ;  it  commemo- 
rates, and  there  must  be  a  thing  commemorated  ; 
a  sign,  and  a  thing  signified  must  be  behind  it. 
This  enormous  tree — St.  Paul's  temple  that  grows 
— spreading  its  live  branches  over  sixty  gener- 
ations of  souls,  and  always  widening  from  one 
Epiphany  to  another,  where  is  its  root  ?  Your 
very  botanists  and  anatomists  tell  3'Ou  things  do 
not  grow  from  nothing.  Come  with  me  a  few  min- 
utes only,  to  find  an  answer  to  this  question. 

You  here  all  know  the  geographic  extent  of 
the  Christian  provinces  to-day.  They  embrace 
the  two  great  continents  that  control  the  forces 
and  lead  the  advance  of  mankind.  Even  of  the 
remainder  of  the  inhabited  territory  this  Christian 


CHRIST  AMONG  MEN.  29 

cause  holds  ports  of  entrance,  and  man}^  chosen 
interior  posts,  positions  that  are  keys  to  the  sev- 
eral lands.  In  the  representative  sense,  as  hav- 
ing access  to  seats  of  population,  and  uttering  a 
voice  there,  the  great  period  may  be  said  to  have 
been  reached,  predicted  by  the  Saviour,  when  the 
Gospel  should  be  preached  to  all  nations.  Under 
an  impulse — please  to  take  notice — which  sprang 
up  afresh  with  mighty  energy  within  this  passing 
century,  just  when  a  certain  school  of  philoso- 
phers have  been  rash  enough  to  pronounce  Chris- 
tianity a  spent  force,  its  institutions  superannu- 
ated and  its  ideas  obsolete,  so  that  men  must  be 
casting  about  for  a  new  religion  or  Gospel  of  to- 
day— just  then,  by  a  general  movement  of  mis- 
sionary life,  whose  sweep  is  as  wide  as  modern 
commerce,  emanating  from  the  breast  of  old 
Christian  communities,  the  lines  of  this  Cause  are 
pushing  forward  from  the  points  just  mentioned, 
penetrating  steadily  the  sluggish  and  corrupt 
masses  of  heathenism  farther  and  farther  in. 
Starting  from  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar,  and  mov- 
ing southward  along  the  trading  stations,  around 
by  the  Cape  to  Madagascar,  and  thence  following 
the  indentations  of  the  Asiatic  coast  to  the  further 
limit  of  Kamtschatka,  you  encounter  constant- 
ly these  unarmed  but  irresistible  intrenchments, 
bases  of  aggressive  operations.  Large  groups  of 
islands.  Pagan  sixty  years  ago,  are  effectively  oc- 
cupied. Traverse  either  of  the  two  divisions 
of  America,  or  the  three  sections  of  the  Eastern 
hemisphere,  and  as  long  as  you  keep  on  the  high- 
ways of  civilization  you  come  upon  working  cen- 


30 


LECTURE    FIRST. 


tres,  not  of  a  stationary  but  of  an  adventuring, 
emigrating,  colonizing,  spreading  Christianity. 

I  ask  you  to  observe  that  I  am  not  using  this  re- 
markable extension  of  Christianity  as  a  final  proof 
that  it  is  true  ;  nor  am  I  bringing  mere  numbers 
or  mere  activities  of  self-propagation  to  convince 
any  body  of  Christian  principles,  as  if  truth  ever 
yet  had  majorities  for  her  criterion,  or  expected 
to  win  her  way  by  a  show  of  hands.  The  purpose 
of  this  reference  to  the  broad  theatre  of  Christian 
action  is  particular,  and  it  is  this  :  The  whole  of 
this  vast  operation  has  proceeded  from  one  spot 
or  birthplace  on  the  globe  ;  it  all  dates  from  one 
point  of  time ;  it  all  owes — confesses  that  it  owes, 
nay,  claims  it  and  glories  in  it  with  universal  con- 
fidence and  a  unanimous  joy — its  very  existence 
to  one  Personage,  whose  name  is  forever  on  the 
lips  of  all  its  messengers  and  workmen. 

Suppose  you  put  yourself  at  any  one  locality 
on  this  immense  surface,  from  centre  to  circum- 
ference ;  it  may  be  in  any  of  the  ancient  cathe- 
drals, built  up  slowly,  layer  by  layer,  of  eloquent 
masonry,  through  generations  or  centuries,  by  the 
patient  hands  of  the  same  abiding  faith  ;  or  in  one 
of  the  countless  httle  companies  of  scarcely  shel- 
tered worshippers  gathered  together  on  the  fron- 
tiers of  new  territories,  along  the  outskirts  of 
newly -discovered  countries,  on  patches  of  verdure 
in  deserts  or  wildernesses,  on  the  edges  of  remote 
islands  of  the  oceans ;  it  may  be  in  any  one  of 
the  tens  of  thousands  of  crowded  metropolitan 
churches  or  any  one  of  the  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  scattered  rural  sanctuaries ;  it  may  be  in  Yeddo, 


CHRIST   AMONG    MEN. 


31 


Jerusalem,  Constantinople,  Canterbury,  Washing- 
ton, San  Francisco,  this  house,  or  in  a  mission-sta- 
tion like  one  that  the  Bishop  of  Prince  Rupert's 
Land  told  me  of,  in  his  diocese,  from  which  it 
took  a  letter  nine  months  of  travel,  by  canoes 
and  dog-sleds  and  Indian  couriers,  to  reach  him  ; 
or  it  may  be  in  any  single  household  of  the  mil- 
lions of  Christian  families  of  all  these  races  and 
nations.  You  ask  the  question,  then,  in  any  of 
the  groups  of  these  hundreds  of  millions  of  Chris- 
tian souls,  whereabouts  on  earth  their  religion 
came  from.  Without  hesitation,  without  vari- 
ation, they  point  you  to  a  district,  not  large,  well- 
defined,  lying  as  much  in  open  light  as  any  other 
since  the  beginning  of  human  history,  accessi- 
ble and  familiar  always  to  travellers  and  chroni- 
clers. You  ask  from  what  time  their  Christian 
religion  dates.  They  all  answer,  at  once,  undoubt- 
ingly,  naming  in  figures  a  precise  and  definite 
epoch,  or  period,  less  in  length  than  the  lifetime 
of  many  individuals,  easily  determinable  by  com- 
parison with  the  reigns  of  contemporary  Roman 
emperors  or  other  historic  characters,  and  with 
public  transactions.  You  ask  once  more  for 
the  one  essential  item  or  element  in  their  belief. 
Instantly,  without  exception,  everywhere,  the 
millions  of  voices  becoming  one,  they  reply 
by  pronouncing  ONE  NAME,  of  one  Person,  one 
man  —  what  more  than  man  we  are  not  now 
inquiring — but  THE  man  Jesus.  They  know,  all 
of  them,  whatever  else  they  know  or  are  igno- 
rant of,  in  whom,  in  what  one  Person  they  believe. 
They  know  that  he  lived  among  men  on  the  spot 


LECTURE    FIRST. 


and  at  the  time  described.  They  know  that  of 
all  that  body  of  facts,  or  cluster  of  actual  events, 
taking  place  in  Judasa,  in  the  five  reigns  of  Au- 
gustus, Tiberius,  Caligula,  Claudius,  and  Nero, 
that  Person  was  the  living  spring,  the  originator, 
the  authority,  the  mover,  without  whom  nothing 
of  the  transactions  would  have  been.  They  believe 
in  this  Person  as  a  Saviour,  through  whom  they 
are  to  have  life  forever.  To  him,  Jesus,  every 
knee  bows  ;  every  tongue  confesses. 

Christendom  is  here,  and  knows  that  it  is  here  ; 
and  it  knows  full  well  whence  it  came.  Science 
must  find  room  for  all  the  facts.  Every  effect  has 
a  cause.  From  this  world-wide  effect  you  move 
straight  up,  on  an  unbroken  line,  till  you  come  to 
one  spot.  There  is  a  child  on  a  peasant  woman's 
breast.  There  is  the  breath  of  cattle  feeding. 
There  is  a  story,  in  the  streets,  of  an  anthem, 
sung  by  angels,  shaking  the  midnight  air,  heard 
by  shepherds.  Then  come  magi  out  of  the 
heathen  twilight,  the  unconscious  prophets  of  a 
Avorld  worshipping  the  Son  of  man,  whom  it  had 
waited  for  and  wanted.  The  ground  will  be 
"  hard  under  your  feet " — from  effect  to  cause — all 
the  way.     The  voice  is  to  the  sons  of  men. 

If,  then,  you  are  asked  why  you  believe,  and 
why  you  do  not  join  in  some  wild  hunt  of  restless 
seekers  after  a  religion  of  to-day,  as  thinking  men 
to  thinking  men,  as  rational  disciples  of  science, 
which  is  one  of  the  daughters  of  God,  speak  the 
name  of  your  living  Lord,  and  answer  that  you 
could  not  believe  otherwise  if  you  would.  Others 
of  you,  having  found  what  that  Friend  is  person- 


CHRIST   AMONG   MEN.  33 

ally  to  your  secret  life,  and  that  there  is  no  life, 
no  love,  no  peace  from  every  kind  of  pain,  like 
his,  no  other  remission  of  your  sins,  and  no  other 
security  for  life  eternal  with  those  you  have  loved 
here,  will  go  farther  and  confess  that  you  would 
not  believe  otherwise  if  you  could,  or  glory  save 
in  him  ! 

Unprofitable  enough  will  be  our  retrospect 
of  all  this  wide  and  wonderful  movement  of 
the  Master  across  the  earth — our  speaking  here 
and  your  hearing  both — if  the  faith  which  has 
so  risen  and  conquered  has  not  come  to  your 
own  heart  and  conquered  its  doubt  and  cast  out 
its  fear !  The  living  Christ  has  come  to  men. 
Have  you,  O  man,  or  daughter  of  man,  said, 
"  Come,  Christ,  to  me !"  Then  "  A  man.  The 
Man,  shall  be  as  an  hiding-place  from  the  wind, 
and  a  covert  from  the  tempest,  as  rivers  of  water 
in  a  dry  place,  as  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock  in  a 
weary  land." 


LECTURE    II. 

©Txrist  ^ccViXxtiX  to  ptjctx  0f  a  ^alsc 
at  3^tTxtus^ 


^ 


"JK^ljom  tijercfovc  jc  ijinorantli)  h)t)rs!)ij),  Jim  Uerlare  K  unto 

JJOU." — Acts  17:  23. 

"JQatf)  not  ©Jon  matie  (oolisf)  t\)t  iuistioni  of  tl;is  inorlD?" 

I  Cor.  1 :  20. 


©Ixrist  iXiscl0SCtX  txr  ^ctt 


OF    A    FALSE    RELIGIOUS    CULTURE.— ST.    PAUL   AT 
ATHENS. 

The  proposition  covering-  the  ground  of  these 
lectures  is  that  the  religion  of  CJwlst  Is  found  to  be 
true  by  its  fitness  to  Dianklnd. 

In  the  shortest  possible  summary,  the  proofs 
brought  to  support  this  claim,  thus  far,  are  that 
Christianity,  from  the  outset,  throws  into  wonder- 
ful prominence  such  truths  and  forces  as  meet 
the  moral  conditions,  elevate  the  affections,  and 
perfect  the  nature  of  men  ;  that,  without  hiding 
but  rather  revealing  its  divinity,  it  yet  comes  em- 
bodied in  a  human  person,  the  only  complete 
man  ever  seen  on  earth  ;  that  in  him  every  form 
of  human  life  is  touched  and  ennobled  ;  that  this 
incarnated  Gospel  takes  a  natural  hold  of  human- 
ity, especially  in  the  great  matters  of  its  teaching, 
such  as  life,  love,  forgiveness  ;  that  this  identifica- 
tion of  the  religion  and  the  person  distinguishes 
the  creed  of  the  church  from  every  other  great 
religious  or  ethical  system  known  in  history  ;  and 
that  the  facts  of  the  planting  and  spread  of  this 
belief,  established  on  principles  purely  historical 
and  scientific,  leave  no  rational  escape  from  the 


38  LECTURE    SECOND. 

conclusion  that  whoever  made  men  made  both 
the  Bible  and  the  kingdom  of  Christ. 

We  now  go  on  to  show  how  this  religion,  re- 
garded as  a  thing  preached,  or  apostolized,  in  the 
highest  grade  of  unchristian  society,  encountered 
the  existing  shapes  of  religious  worship  and 
thought,  being  suited  supremely  to  what  we  may 
call,  without  disrespect  to  philosophy,  man's  fac- 
ulty of  faith. 

St.  Paul  has  entered  Europe.  In  his  apostolic 
person  the  Gospel  now  comes  in  contact  with  a 
new  civilization  and  a  foreign  religion — a  climate 
as  alien  to  it,  one  might  think,  as  the  snows  of 
Mount  Olympus  to  the  sunshine  of  Mount  Zion. 
Yet  underneath  Syria  and  Macedonia  alike,  and  the 
Mediterranean  between  them,  is  one  and  the  same 
earth,  and  so  under  all  the  continents  of  human 
thought,  and  the  seas  of  human  feeling,  is  one 
humanity.  Christ  took  it  upon  him,  and  there- 
fore to  Asiatic  and  European,  African  and  Ameri- 
can, Christ  came  in  one  Catholic  Epiphany. 

No  arrival  on  European  soil  ever  carried  with 
it  the  seeds  of  such  revolutions — not  the  career 
of  Minos,  or  Xerxes,  or  Alexander,  or  all  of  them 
together.  The  struggles  of  earthly  sovereignties 
and  sciences  were  to  be  overshadowed  by  the 
sudden  collision  of  a  kingdom  from  on  high  with 
those  ideas  and  principalities  which  rule  this 
world.  The  most  salient  incident  in  this  west- 
ward migration  of  the  Faith  was  its  meeting  with 
the  Athenian  mind  at  Mars'  Hill.  But  even  that, 
as  we  shall  see,  was  only  the  crest  of  a  wave 
which  was  to  break  all  along  the  western  lands. 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN. 


39 


Already,  to  some  extent,  this  second  struggle  of 
the  Gospel,  its  issue  with  heathenism,  had  been 
begun  on  the  soil  of  Asia  Minor.  Now  it  rises 
into  the  chief  place.  The  wrench  that  had  loosen- 
ed the  bands  of  a  local  and  national  religion  from 
the  limbs  of  the  young  church  at  Antioch  was  to 
be  consummated  in  a  more  complete  liberating 
of  it  at  Athens.  For  that  reason  we  are  the 
more  impressed  to  find  that,  after  crossing  the 
Gulf,  the  apostle,  indefatigable  as  ever  in  seek- 
ing his  Hebrew  countrymen  for  Christ,  in  spite  of 
all  their  hatred,  and  though  just  escaped  from  the 
Thessalonian  persecution,  still  clings  to  his  habit 
of  proclaiming  the  message  first  to  the  dispersed 
of  Israel  before  he  turns  to  the  Gentile.  ''  There- 
fore disputed  he  daily  in  the  synagogue  with  the 
Jews." 

If  any  proof  were  wanted  of  his  quickness  to 
distinguish  between  fair  conciliation  and  cowardly 
compromise,  and  of  his  stiffness  against  all  con- 
cession the  moment  it  went  so  far  as  to  obliterate 
the  lines  of  dogmatic  truth,  we  have  it  in  the  life- 
long polemic  attitude  of  his  whole  mind  towards 
the  Judaizers.  This  traditional  and  ritualistic  party 
in  the  church  was  made  up,  remember,  of  Chris- 
tians, and  often  of  an  ardent  and  aggressive  type. 
One  of  their  chief  arguments  for  adhering  to 
ceremonial  precedents  was  that  it  might  bring  in 
gradually  the  entire  old  Israel  into  the  Body  of 
Christ.  They  contrasted  contemptuously  the 
value  of  a  Gentile  convert  and  a  Jewish  proselyte 
— having  it  for  a  foregone  conclusion  that  one 
man  circumcised  was  worth  at  least  ten  evangeli- 


40  LECTURE    SECOND. 

cals  without  that  patriarchal  sacrament.  Even 
the  conciliar  decision  at  Jerusalem,  dispensing 
with  circumcision,  only  partially  controlled  this 
exclusive  policy.  Besides,  the  Judaizer  had  his 
texts.  If  all  nations  were  to  call  the  Son  of  Mary 
blessed,  yet  the  word  was  to  go  forth  from  Zion ; 
if  the  Light  of  the  Cross  was  to  lighten  the  Gen- 
tiles, nevertheless  salvation  is  of  the  Jews  ;  if  the 
law  v/as  to  be  somehow  superseded,  so  was  it  all 
to  be  somehow  fulfilled.  Would  it  not,  then,  be 
advance  enough  from  this  Christian  Judaism  that  it 
was  a  Judaism  whose  Messiah  had  already  come  ? 
In  short,  the  case  on  that  side  was  made  up  in  the 
alleged  interest  of  the  Gospel.  Would  there  be 
an  acuteness  sharp  and  incisive  enough,  as  well  as 
a  language  venturesome  enough,  to  cut  the  fallacy 
asunder  ?  It  was  then  as  it  is  commonly  ;  the  most 
plausible  pretext  for  adulterating  the  chaste  truth 
as  it  is  in  Jesus,  or  for  veiling  its  severer  expression, 
was  that  such  breadth  would  set  forward  the  cause 
by  humoring  the  popular  prepossessions  which 
occupied  the  field.  It  is  the  plea  of  the  tempor- 
izer as  against  the  martyr ;  of  the  politician  as 
against  the  statesman  ;  of  the  man  of  expedients 
and  party  as  against  the  man  of  faith. 

You  see  the  connection  with  my  argument. 
Had  Christianity  come  to  be  the  religion  of  one 
race,  or  of  the  world  ?  of  the  Jew,  or  of  man  ? 
The  Jew,  to  be  sure,  is  a  man  ;  but  man  cannot 
always  be  a  Jew.  If  the  Gospel  is  said  to  be  true 
because  it  suits  humanity,  and  then  if  one  type  of 
man  monopolizes  it,  even  though  he  got  his  cere- 
monial and  his  law  once  from  heaven,  the  logic 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN. 


41 


breaks.  St.  Paul,  the  apostle  chosen  to  that 
end,  shall  deal  with  that  dilemma.  He  has  too 
clear  a  sight  of  the  real  breadth  and  freedom  of 
both  the  spirit  and  the  constitution  of  the  church 
of  the  living  God  to  be  bewildered  for  an  instant 
by  the  sophistry  that  would  dwarf  it  down — 
this  Christian  Jerusalem  that  lieth  foursquare 
like  the  superb  quadrilateral  of  Lombardy,  with 
its  tAvelve  gates  open — into  a  Palestinian  sect ; 
and  so,  after  the  tremendous  manner  of  his  em- 
phasis, he  shuts  the  door  of  accommodation  in 
that  direction  tight  :  ''  If  ye  be  circumcised, 
Christ  shall  profit  you  nothing."  "  Ye  are  not 
under  the  law."  ''  The  letter  killeth."  ''  Be  not 
entangled  with  any  such  yoke  of  bondage." 

This  Gospel  is  for  man — for  Gentile  man,  for 
magi  as  well  as  shepherds,  for  the  man  of  the 
West  no  less  than  for  the  man  of  the  East,  for 
Paul  the  missionary  of  the  Mediterranean  as 
mvich  as  for  Saul  of  Tarsus  at  the  feet  of  Gama- 
liel. Just  at  this  crisis  of  the  Faith  we  meet  him 
disembarking  at  the  gate  of  another  continent. 
He  reaches  the  seat  of  the  second  of  the  two 
schools  of  faulty  religious  culture,  which,  from  the 
first,  have  outwardly  narrowed  or  inwardly  cor- 
rupted the  breadth  and  simplicity  that  are  in 
Christ. 

The  question  will  be.  Whether  these  oppositions 
qualify  or  contradict  our  position,  that  human 
nature  wants  the  Gospel,  and  finally,  in  the  long- 
run,  is  satisfied  only  in  Christ.  It  might  go  far 
to  answer  that  question,  and  in  the  negative, 
that  the  same  New  Testament,  the  word  of  Christ 


42  LECTURE    SECOND. 

himself  and  his  apostles,  which  appeals  to  man 
to  accept  and  obey  it  by  his  free  faith,  clearly  an- 
ticipates and  foretells  both  these  two  natural  op- 
ponents of  its  rule. 

There  are  two  historically  prominent  types  of 
distortion — the  externalizing  and  the  rationalizing, 
ceremony  and  opinion — reverence  for  the  con- 
crete, outward,  visible  rehgious  thing,  and  rever- 
ence for  the  unseen  spirit  or  the  abstract  relig- 
ious idea.  In  ethics,  or  matters  of  conscience, 
they  appear  respectively  as  literalism  and  liberty  ; 
in  metaphysics,  as  common-sense  guided  by  per- 
ception, and  transcendentalism  trusting  to  intui- 
tion ;  and  in  the  cultus  of  worship  they  diverge 
naturally  into  the  aesthetic  or  ceremonial  *'  cele- 
bration" on  the  one  hand,  and  into  the  subjective 
''  state,"  or  inward  experience,  whether  specula- 
tive or  mystical,  according  as  intellect  or  emotion 
predominates,  on  the  other.  One,  6p7]aK6ia,  finds 
religion  as  a  fact  in  history  and  in  life  ;  the  other, 
yvGoaz?,  finds  it  as  a  conception  or  a  sentiment  in 
the  mind.  The  one  disciple  scarcely  recognizes 
religion  except  as  he  sees  and  touches  it  in  the 
church.  The  other  consents  to  admit  a  church 
as  an  unessential  and  variable  accessory  to  his 
religion.  It  is  not  unusual,  and  perhaps  not  un- 
fair, to  characterize  the  two  principles  as  tenden- 
cies to  opposite  heresies.  Might  it  not  be  as  well, 
however,  to  call  them  the  exaggerations  of  two 
half-truths,  every  half-truth  being  always  in  effect, 
though  not  in  intent,  of  the  nature  of  a  heresy — in 
the  original  sense  of  that  word — till  the  other  half 
comes  and  is  placed  by  its  side  to  make  a  whole  .^ 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN. 


43 


Limited  and  controlled,  Christianity  is  not  only 
large  enough  and  willing  to  include  them  both, 
but,  as  a  catholic  necessity,  it  must  include  them. 
That  they  both  have  a  surprising  facility  of  break- 
ing from  their  allegiance,  especially  if  organized 
and  drilled  into  party,  is  plain  enough  not  only 
from  history  all  along,  but  from  the  fact  that  we 
find  them  both  beside  the  cradle  of  the  Christian 
church,  and  in  the  apostolic  and  sub-apostolic  age 
threatening  the  very  life  of  the  new-born  child. 

St.  Paul  deals  with  the  first,  Judaism,  the  party 
of  precedent,  as  we  have  seen,  on  what  may  be 
called  the  native  soil  of  the  Christian  king- 
dom, among  his  kinsmen  according  to  the  flesh, 
'*  whose  are  the  adoption,  and  the  glory,  and 
the  covenants,  and  the  giving  of  the  law."  He 
meets  the  second  squarely  when  he  lands  at  the 
Pirgeus.  That  short  voyage  was  more  than  a  pas- 
sage from  one  to  another  continent.  He  has 
emigrated  from  one  to  another  world  of  thought. 
He  has  sailed  away  from  Mosaic  institutions, 
Abrahamic  covenants,  and  theocratic  colorinsrs  of 
social  order,  save  as  he  carries  them,  a  Hebrew 
of  the  Hebrews,  in  his  own  blood.  The  syna- 
gogue looks  smaller,  the  old  capital — "  beautiful 
for  situation" — recedes,  and  the  turrets  of  the 
Temple  sink  behind  the  rim  of  the  sea.  Hence- 
forth, with  a  wider  horizon,  but  on  terribly 
blighted  ground,  a  new  work  has  to  be  done  with 
new  instruments.  Contrary  to  the  prediction  of 
the  Judaists,  the  incoming  Gentile  accession  was 
to  be  by  far  the  more  important.  Epiphany 
prophecies  of  a  missionary  age  were  to  begin  to 


44  LECTURE    SECOND. 

be  fulfilled.  All  Europe,  and  an  American  child 
out  of  its  loins  larger  than  itself — the  future  of 
both  being  hidden  yet  under  the  forests — were  to 
yield  their  myriads  of  baptized  disciples  to  be 
"  fellow-heirs  of  the  same  body." 

The  seed-grain  laid  up  in  the  ark  Avas  to  sprout 
into  a  tree  to  heal  the  nations,  and  grow  by  a 
broader  sweep.  How  broad  should  it  be?  Of 
what  streams  should  it  drink  ?  Should  it  offer  an 
indiscriminate  shelter  and  a  promiscuous  hospital- 
ity ?  One  thing  is  clear.  Directly  in  the  path  of 
the  new  Cause  stood  a  huge  figure  of  Idolatry, 
a  sword  in  his  hand,  animal  lusts  boiHng  in  his 
veins,  altars  smoking  with  impure  fires  all  round 
him.  Of  this  muscular  pagan  giant  Athens  was 
the  brain.  Whatever  they  might  borrow,  by 
way  of  Alexandria,  where  all  the  three  leading 
Gnostics  appeared,  from  the  genius  of  Philo,  from 
the  Oriental  imagination,  or  even  from  the  liter- 
ary treasures  of  the  Old  Testament,  the  Greek 
schools  of  philosophy,  as  the  Gospel  found  them, 
had  come  of  an  essentially  independent  stock. 
They  represent  the  purely  natural  or  non-Chris- 
tian working  of  the  human  mind,  sufficient  to 
itself,  headstrong,  not  without  inborn  religious 
instincts,  but  not  subject  to  revealed  authority  ; 
with  no  object  for  faith,  no  Sim  of  righteousness 
risen  upon  it ;  polytheistic  here,  pantheistic  there, 
atheistic  elsewhere,  but  restless  and  wretched 
everywhere,  either  walking  in  a  chilly  light 
or  wallowing  in  a  sty  of  sensuality,  as  tempera- 
ment and  climate  might  condition  it.  Classi- 
cal usage  shows  that  in  the  complimentary  word 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  45 

used  by  the  apostle  in  this  address,  rendered  *'  too 
superstitious,"  there  was  implied  a  meaning  of 
fear,  the  apprehensive  presentiment  of  evil  in  con- 
nection with  religion,  which  ran  all  through  the 
heathen  mind,  and  which  especially  threw  a  dark 
shade  over  all  its  faint  expectations  of  a  future 
life,  making  rather  dreadful  than  attractive  that 
Hereafter  for  which  the  Gospel  pubhshes  the 
cheerful  tidings  of  atonement  and  peace. 

We  want  to  know  precisely  what  this  diseased 
condition  was  to  which  Paul  spoke.  It  was  not, 
as  so  many  expositors  have  supposed,  that  anoma- 
lous mixture  and  monstrosity  to  which  the  Zoroas- 
trian,  the  Egyptian,  probably  the  Buddhist,  and 
certainly  the  cabalistic  rabbi  all  contributed  their 
fantasies  ;  not  that  notion  of  emanations,  wdiich 
the  apostle  probably  did  have  in  mind  as  ''  gen- 
ealogies" when  he  afterwards  wrote  the  Pastoral 
Epistles,  as  the  angel-worship  which  he  re- 
bukes to  the  Colossians,  or  the  "  science,  falsely 
so-called,"  against  which  he  warns  St.  Timothy, 
and  the  "■  knowledge  which  puffeth  up"  (''  Hellen- 
istic smoke"  is  Chrysostom's  expression),  which 
he  denounces  to  the  Corinthians  ;  no,  it  was  stark 
heathenism,  half  rationalistic  and  half  afraid  of 
gods — an  intellectual  worldliness  haunted  by 
dreams  of  judgment.  This  formed  the  second 
antagonist  to  the  faith  of  Christ,  and  it  was  this 
that  sat  enthroned  on  the  Athenian  Areopagus 
surrounded  by  altars. 

What  is  remarkable,  and  what  brings  the  mat- 
ter home  to  us  here,  is  this  :  in  one  of  those  cir- 
cular movements  of  thought  which   have  been 


46  LECTURE    SECOND. 

often  known  in  the  world,  it  is  the  same  antago- 
nist, in  substance,  which  has  sprung  up  even  under 
the  sunHght  of  Christianity,  and  is  in  France,  in 
Great  Britain,  in  Germany,  in  America  to-day — 
only  that  now  it  proposes  to  allow  Christianity, 
stripped  of  its  divine  insignia,  and  emasculated  of 
its  supernatural  vigor,  to  hold  a  place,  as  a  sort 
of  religio  licit  a,  in  a  corner  of  its  eclectic  Pan- 
theon ;  patronizing  the  prophet  and  his  parables, 
but  rejecting  the  Redeemer  on  his  cross  ;  not  alto- 
gether unlike  the  Athenians  themselves,  who  saw 
in  the  foreign  preacher  only  ''  a  setter  forth  of 
strange  gods,  because  he  preached  unto  them 
Jesus  and  the  resurrection." 

Who  is  he,  then,  that  shall  carry  and  defend 
The  Faith  against  this  its  second  foe  ?  The 
same,  it  appears,  who,  as  we  have  seen,  would  not 
suffer  it  to  be  walled  up  in  a  synagogue  or  strait- 
ened or  stiffened  into  a  sect.  He  must  be,  for 
this  special  vocation,  a  man  who  knows  some- 
thing of  the  peculiar  and  subtle  forms  of  mental 
activity  with  which  he  will  have  to  deal.  A  pro- 
vincial birthplace  adds  to  his  Jewish  training  un- 
der Gamaliel  some  affinities  with  Grecian  spec- 
ulation. He  has  talked  with  Stoics  probably  at 
Tarsus — for  they  were  there — and  has  mastered  a 
scholarship  extensive  enough  to  embrace  not  only 
the  Aristotelian  dialectics,  but  lyric  poets  no  bet- 
ter known  to  the  modern  Greek  student  than 
Menander  and  Epimenides.  Roman  citizenship 
affords  him  the  advantage  of  cosmopolitan  man- 
ners. Experience  with  all  sorts  of  people,  a  sin- 
gular sagacity  in  seizing  on  oratorical  points  sug- 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN,  47 

gested  by  personal  peculiarities  as  well  as  the 
surprises  of  popular  assemblies;  and,  lastly,  a 
fortitude  which  there  was  no  scourge  sharp 
enough  or  dungeon  dark  enough  to  terrify, 
from  Syria  to  Spain — these  are  but  accessories  to 
the  original,  acute,  energetic,  versatile,  incisive, 
capacious  mind,  which,  by  common  consent,  has 
not  been  overmatched  anywhere  at  any  time. 

Will  there  be  any  here,  my  brethren,  so  bold  as 
to  disparage  learning  in  the  Christian  minister,  or 
ready  to  reduce  among  us  the  standard  of  liter- 
ary requirement  in  candidates  for  it  ?  We  claim 
it  here  as  one  of  the  very  proofs  that  our  Christian- 
ity suits  whatever  is  of  the  Maker  in  man,  that  it 
welcomes  his  highest  intellectual  service,  accepts 
the  gifts  of  his  learning,  and  crowns  them  with  its 
consecration.  Disparage  the  accomplishments  of 
the  scholar  we  might  indeed,  but  for  Avhat  we 
behold  along  with  and  above  them.  For  they  are 
all  in  tJiis  man  so  completely  penetrated  by  one 
solemn  conviction,  so  saturated  with  one  holy 
affection,  so  crowned  and  glorified  with  loyalty  to 
one  Personal  Leader,  that  he  could  say,  into  what- 
ever city  or  company  he  came,  "  Now,  then,  it  is 
no  more  I — Avith  whatever  honors  of  moral  and  in- 
tellectual manhood  you  may  cover  me — it  is  no 
more  /that  live,  but  Christ  liveth  in  me." 

We  have  the  Gospel  again  embodied  in  a  man, 
not  the  divine  Man,  but  as  completely  furnished 
a  specimen  of  man  purely  human  as  antiquity 
affords,  and  Christianity  suits  him  exactly  in 
every  fibre  and  gift. 

Stand  with  him  at  Mars*  Hill.    Before  him  were 


48  LECTURE    SECOND. 

Spokesmen  of  two  systems:  ''Certain  philoso- 
phers of  the  Stoics  and  of  the  Epicureans  en- 
countered him."  We  are  not  to  suppose  from 
the  express  mention  of  these  two  that  there  was 
any  special  relation  between  either  or  both  of 
them  to  the  teachings  of  St.  Paul.  I  recall  with 
great  interest  a  conversation  of  the  lamented  and 
genial  Greek  Professor  Felton,  at  Cambridge,  after 
his  return  from  the  East,  in  which  he  referred  to 
having  detected,  while  standing  on  that  hill,  with 
the  Book  of  the  Acts  open  in  his  hand,  one  of  the 
"undesigned  coincidences,"  worthy  to  be  placed 
with  those  of  Blunt  or  Paley,  which  the  more  con- 
firm the  narrative  the  more  concealed  they  lie.  It 
was  evident,  he  said,  that  the  two  schools  named — 
Stoic  and  Epicurean — were  referred  to  simply 
from  the  accident  of  their  proximity  to  the  spot. 
The  gardens  of  Epicurus  lay  on  the  south-west, 
near  the  bed  of  the  Ilissus,  where  the  founder 
arranged  the  lovely  scenery  of  his  instructions, 
bequeathing  the  grounds  afterwards  to  his  follow- 
ers on  condition  that  they  should  keep  them  con- 
secrated to  learning,  and  observe  there  a  yearly 
festival  to  his  memory.  Not  far  eastward,  within 
the  very  enclosure  of  the  Agora,  was  the  cloister 
which  Zeno  the  Stoic  had  transformed  from  the 
seat  of  a  symposium  of  poets  into  a  lecture-hall  of 
Stoic  morality — that  stern  delusion  which  aspired 
to  be  indifferent  to  evil,  not  knowing  it  as  sin  but 
despising  it  as  weakness,  endeavoring  to  substi- 
tute for  the  Holy  Ghost,  the  Comforter,  the  cheer- 
less resistance  of  a  stubborn  human  will. 

Take  notice,  there  were  two  other  forms  of  phil- 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN. 


49 


osophy,  both  of  which  would  seem  to  have  much 
more  in  common  with  the  profound  doctrines  of 
Christ  and  the  Resurrection  ;  why  were  not  their 
representatives  draAvn  also  about  this  solemn 
foreigner  who  had  deeper  things  on  his  lips  than 
either  of  the  two  great  pupils  of  Socrates  could  tell  ? 
For  the  commonplace  reason,  as  Professor  Felton 
observed,  that  the  Lyceum,  with  the  walks  of  the 
Peripatetics,  was  situated  away  at  the  north-east ; 
while  in  a  different  direction  still,  and  so  far  out 
as  to  be  suburban,  grew  the  olive  groves  of  the 
Academy.  It  only  happened  that  they  who  were 
in  sight  of  the  market-place  saw  the  stir  of  the 
concourse  occasioned  by  the  striking  stranger, 
and  went  out  to  inquire  what  new  excitement  had 
come. 

Blend  Zeno  and  Plato  together,  and  you  have 
the  pantheist  of  pure  reason  ;  not  the  unqualified 
pantheist  who  quite  denies  a  primal  Deity  from 
which  all  lower  life  flows,  not  the  gross  panthe- 
ist that  Augustine  describes,  believing  in  a  God 
who  pervades  the  universe  as  honey  pervades  the 
comb  in  the  hive,  and  not  merely  the  pantheist 
of  antiquity,  but  the  pantheist  of  intellectual 
self-sufficiency.  We  have  him  close  by  us,  for  he  . 
moves  up  and  down  the  land  from  one  lecture- 
stand  to  another,  Stoic  or  Sybarite  as  may  hap- 
pen in  temperament,  a  Platonist  or  a  Lucretian  in 
philosophy,  brilliant  and  eloquent  perhaps,  unit- 
ing to  an  almost  passionless  purity  many  a  grace 
that  has  been  borrowed — with  interest  unpaid — 
from  the  ethics  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  To 
the  Stoic  at  Athens,  as  at  Paris,  London,  Philadel- 


50 


LECTURE    SECOND. 


phia,  the  preaching  of  the  resurrection  would  be 
eminently  **  foolishness ;"  for  though  he  might 
understand  something  of  the  cross,  regarded  as 
a  sublime  sign  of  human  martyrdom,  he  held, 
according  to  Ritter,  that  the  soul,  being  itself 
material,  is  either  consumed  at  death  or  loses  its 
personality  by  absorption.  Even  the  scenes  of 
the  crucifixion,  with  their  divine  tenderness  and 
human  sensibility,  would  be  all  remote  from  the 
apathetic  endurance  of  a  scheme  whose  two  lead- 
ers died  by  their  own  hands,  and  which  can  wel- 
come no  Saviour  because  its  pride  acknowledges 
no  sicknesses  to  be  healed,  and  no  sins  to  be  for- 
given. As  to  Epicurus,  when  the  maxims  of 
Positivism — whose  modern  doctrine  of  responsi- 
bility is  a  singular  reproduction  of  the  old  Epi- 
cureanism— shall  become  popularized,  none  of  us 
here  can  doubt,  I  suppose,  that  they  will  spread 
the  same  narcotic  poison  over  the  conscience  that 
brooded  in  the  atmosphere  of  the  Athenian  gar- 
den. 

The  Peripatetic  sought  the  knowledge  of  things  ; 
the  Platonist,  the  reason  of  things ;  the  Stoic, 
superiority  and  indifference  to  things ;  the  Epi- 
curean, the  enjoyment  of  things.  In  mixtures 
very  various,  and  more  and  more  as  open  enemies 
to  the  cross  of  Christ,  they  are  all  here  at  our 
door.  If  we  take,  as  we  surely  may  without  vio- 
lence, the  porch  as  standing  for  the  party  of  a 
Christless  morality,  the  garden  for  a  Christless 
pleasure,  the  lyceum  for  a  Christless  science,  and 
the  academy  for  a  Christless  religious  culture,  we 
shall  have  four  incredulous  critics  which  every 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  5 1 

preacher  and  pastor  has  to  see  before  him,  to 
question  or  to  answer,  and  to  try  with  all  his 
might  to  convince  and  convert,  as  he  stands  up, 
Sunday  by  Sunday,  to  preach  ''  Jesus  and  the 
resurrection." 

The  lounging  religion-mongers  who  waited  that 
day  about  the  ordinary  resorts  for  a  new  sensa- 
tion were  sure  to  find  it  in  this  fresh  thinker,  with 
his  startling  ideas  and  crisp  discourse.  He  is 
taken  to  the  Areopagus,  some  writers  have  im- 
agined to  overawe  him  with  the  august  memo- 
ries of  the  tribunal  where  so  many  judicial  sen- 
tences had  been  pronounced ;  others  think  to 
provide  him  a  more  appropriate  pulpit ;  but 
more  probably  than  either,  as  a  kind  of  practical 
witticism  in  the  grotesque  contrast  between  the 
futile  fanatic  they  took  him  to  be  and  this  solid 
bench  of  public  justice — certainly  not  for  a  reg- 
ular trial,  which  nothing  in  the  narrative  sug- 
gests. The  apostle  moves  up  the  stone  steps 
without  dismay,  meekly  conscious  that,  in  his 
weak  bodily  presence,  before  he  has  done,  Christ's 
strength  will  be  made  sufficiently  perfect — the 
only  strength  any  true  preacher  ever  feels  within 
him ;  sure  that  it  shall  be  given  him  in  that  same 
hour  what  he  shall  speak  ;  he  the  real  master  of 
all  the  masters  that  have  led  their  pupils  along 
those  streets,  and  they  the  "  babblers  ;"  he  the 
steadfast  witness,  steady  as  the  rock  where  he 
stands ;  they  the  feathers  ''  tossed  to  and  fro  with 
every  wind  of  doctrine." 

At  the  very  beginning  of  the  address  we  hear 
an  accent  of  conciliation;   but  it  is  conciliation 


52  LECTURE    SECOND. 

prompted  by  something  holier  than  policy  or  the 
success  of  his  speech.  To  St.  Paul  Jesus  Christ 
is  so  much  more  than  all  successes  that  the  con- 
verting to  him  of  a  single  soul  subordinates  every 
other  purpose ;  and  to  that  end  no  honest  conces- 
sion, no  sacrifice  of  taste,  no  rhetorical  pains,  shall 
be  spared.  To  his  eyes  men  exist  only  to  have 
Christ  formed  in  them  ^'  the  hope  of  glory." 
We  come  now  to  our  fundamental  proposition, 
lying,  as  I  said,  under  all  the  continents  of  thought, 
the  seas  of  diverse  feeling,  the  shifting  climates  of 
men's  manners.  When  the  apostle  utters  the 
dignified  salutation,  *'  Ye  men  of  Athens,"  the 
thought  burns  in  him  that  every  one  of  these 
men  is  capable  of  the  great  salvation.  How 
shall  he  reach  them  ?  Is  there  one  common 
idea  or  feeling  between  him  and  them  that  he 
can  transmute  into  a  living  link  to  convey  to 
them  this  grace  of  God  and  this  gift  of  eternal 
life  ?  Already  these  assembling  crowds  have 
learnt  that  he  has  come  over  the  sea  as  the  advo- 
cate of  a  foreign  religion.  Shall  some  false  pride 
or  fooUsh  audacity  in  him  widen,  at  the  first 
stroke,  the  distance,  and  repel  or  exasperate 
them  ?  He  is  to  tell  them  what  kind  of  men  they 
are ;  he  knows  that  they  are  fickle,  frivolous,  su- 
perficial heathen  men  ;  and  he  has  courage  enough 
to  say  that  out  if  he  will.  They  have  provoked 
and  insulted  him ;  he  who  could  stand  before 
kings  and  councils,  making  a  Felix  tremble,  can, 
if  he  is  so  minded,  repay  ridicule  with  scorn.  He 
begins,  as  you  know,  with  that  most  candid  and 
graceful  tribute,  which  the  singular  infelicity  of 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  53 

our  version  so  nearly  perverts  and  so  completely 
hides :  '^  Ye,  too,  Athenians,  are  men  whose  minds 
are  very  religious,  eminently  curious  about  dei- 
ties," 6ei(jidaifA.ove?repoi,  '*  My  own  eyesight,"  he 
says,  *'  bears  witness  that  what  so  many  travellers 
have  said  of  you  is  true.  For  as  I  passed  by  and 
beheld  your  devotions,  I  found  an  altar  with  this 
inscription,  *  To  the  Unknown  God  ! '  "  Here, 
then,  is  established  at  once  a  certain  bond  of  com- 
mon feeling.  But  lo  !  how  slender  it  is  !  Their 
"religion"?  Why,  was  it  not  the  very  saddest 
of  all  the  features  of  their  life  ?  the  very  abomina- 
tion that  just  now  had  so  mightily  stirred  his 
spirit  ?  Yet  out  of  it  he  will  pluck  materials  and 
proofs  of  the  energetic  conclusions  he  has  to  pro- 
claim. He  will  even  take  a  text  cut  on  one  of 
their  idolatrous  altars,  if  he  can  thereby  win  and 
gain  and  save  one  sinner  for  whom  his  Saviour 
died. 

Before  an  educated  assembly  like  this,  it  would 
be  superfluous  to  go  over  the  aspects  of  the  Athe- 
nian streets  as  St.  Paul  passed  through  them. 
Ancient  and  modern  topographers  enable  even 
untravelled  students  to  follow  him,  step  by  step, 
from  the  Peiraic  gate  to  the  Acropolis,  catching, 
at  every  movement  of  the  eye,  some  recognized 
image — the  sculptured  monument  of  some  Avell- 
known  divinity  in  a  bhnd  and  polluted  poly- 
theism. Altar  succeeds  to  altar.  Temple  rises 
above  temple.  Commemorated  orators,  artists, 
tragedians,  soldiers,  men  of  ill-employed  strength, 
women  of  wicked  beauty,  stood  as  the  stone  sen- 
tinels or  seducers  of  a  still  vital  idolatry.     There 


54  LECTURE    SECOND. 

was  a  Latin  satire  that  it  was  easier  to  find  a  god 
in  Athens  than  a  man.  An  '*  altar"  would  seem 
to  have  been  the  one  thing  there  that  the  apos- 
tle could  not  name  without  a  cry  of  indignant 
lamentation. 

His  searching  glance  sees  one  not  mentioned  by 
other  explorers.  They  have  indeed  noticed  some 
traces  of  an  adoration  approaching  that  which  ar- 
rested this  quick-sighted  missionary's  attention  ; 
for  they  tell  us  of  several  shrines  erected  to  mere 
abstractions  of  the  mind — to  Energy  and  Per- 
suasion, to  Oblivion  and  to  Fame,  and,  what 
seemed  least  likely  of  all,  even  to  Pity.  In  the 
upAvard  grade  of  religious  aspiration  these  are 
evidently  at  but  one  remove  from  the  ''  altar  to 
the  unknown  God." 

Whichever  of  the  disputed  accounts  we  accept 
of  the  origin  and  sense  of  the  inscription — even 
though  we  take  Jerome's  reading  as  the  true  one, 
which  makes  the  noun  plural,  including  all  sup- 
posable  and  undiscovered  deities — the  craving  of 
the  unsatisfied  soul  which  it  so  pathetically  pleads 
is  essentially  the  same.  There  is  one  iinaiiswered 
zvant  in  their  bewildered  hearts,  and  it  is  felt. 
Yes,  man  is  there,  as  well  as  altars.  That  is 
enough.  On  that  one  solitary  surviving  shred  of 
the  divine  workmanship  in  their  nature  Paul  rests 
his  hope  of  raising  them  yet,  a  regenerated  peo- 
ple, into  the  kingship  and  priesthood  of  the  fel- 
lowship of  saints. 

The  verse  I  have  quoted  follows.  As  I  take  it, 
it  is  a  key  that  opens  the  zvorld  of  nnhelief  and  sin  to 
the  whole  heavenly  life  and  poiver  of  the  Gospel  of 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  55 

Christ,  It  unlocks  the  inner  door  by  which  God's 
•revelation  enters  the  spirit  of  man.  "  Whom 
therefore  ye  ignorantly  Avorship."  ''  Whom  there- 
fore ye  worship  unknowing"  (it  is  only  another 
inflection  of  the  same  verb  with  the  "  unknown," 
applied  to  the  God  of  the  sentence  before,  and 
therefore  embodies  only  the  Greek's  own  confes- 
sion)— ''him,"  this  "'unknown,'  declare  I  unto 
you."  That  is,  Christ  the  God-man  brings  the  God 
he  incarnates  to  that  in  man  which  needs  and  is 
enabled  to  receive  him.  The  Gospel  alone  *'  finds" 
and  fills  the  want.  To  interpret  that  want  into 
a  desire,  to  excite  and  direct  the  desire,  is  the 
first  office  in  order  of  the  Christian  preacher. 
No  grown  man  is  saved  till  he  feels  in  him  this 
want ;  when  he  feels  it,  as  really  a  want  of  Christ's 
salvation,  he  begins  to  be  saved,  because  the 
sense  of  sin  is  the  first  movement  to  faith.  Were 
there  no  reaching  and  feeling  after  God,  there 
would  be  no  free  reception  of  a  free  redemption, 
no  coming  to  Christ.  Hence,  however  he  does 
it,  by  whatever  one  or  more  than  one  of  the  thou- 
sand evangelic  methods  that  are  open  to  him, 
reaching  all  the  way  from  the  most  attractive  ex- 
hibitions of  God's  love  to  the  most  terrible  uncov- 
ering of  his  Judgment,  he  unquestionably  is  the 
successful  preacher  who  so  goes  first  to  the  roots 
of  human  weakness  and  depravity  as  to  rouse 
into  unquenchable  life  in  man  the  longing  after 
God.  Him — whom  the  world  unknowingly  ac- 
knowledges and  worships — declare  we  unto  it  as 
the  God  in  Christ,  warning  and  encouraging 
every  man. 


56  LECTURE    SECOND. 

The  analysis  of  the  sermon  at  Mars'  Hill  has 
been  so  often  undertaken,  from  Chrj^sostom  down, 
that  perhaps  every  ray  of  light  which  can  be 
thrown  to  and  fro  between  its  several  clauses,  for 
their  mutual  elucidation,  has  become  familiar  to 
the  BibUcal  student.  The  speech  contains  eight 
sentences.  Dr.  Bentley,  in  the  second  of  his 
Boyle  Lectures  on  Atheism,  Dean  Milman,  in  his 
History,  and  Mr.  Stanley,  in  his  Oxford  Sermons, 
have  gone  particularly  into  its  negative  bearing, 
as  a  refutation  of  existing  opinions.  It  is  certainly 
striking  that  up  to  that  point  in  the  discourse 
where  the  speaker  touches  on  the  miracle  of  the 
resurrection,  each  idea  and  expression  he  utters 
in  order  will  find  one  or  another  powerful  pagan 
party  assenting  to  it ;  while  every  such  party,  in 
some  other  portion,  would  find  its  tenets  traversed 
and  its  maxims  denied.  Thus  the  whole  listening 
assembly  would  be  held  in  a  marvellously  skilful 
balance  throughout,  till,  at  last,  the  distinctive 
and  crucial  doctrine,  which  he  is  there  especially 
to  publish,  dissolves  this  temporary  truce,  and  a 
general  outburst  of  derision  breaks  up  the  audi- 
ence. After  all,  however,  what  most  concerns  us 
and  all  Christendom  in  these  compact  and  weighty 
words  is  their  positive  affirmations,  irrespective  of 
all  temporary  or  local  phases  of  human  thought. 
These  affirmations  are  five  :  i.  The  absolute  unity, 
spirituality,  and  self-existent  personality  of  the 
true  God,  as  the  object  of  Christian  worship,  and 
the  prime  fact  of  the  Christian  creed ;  2.  The 
origin  of  the  universe  in  his  creatorship,  as  the 
foundation  of  the  redemption,  or  new  creation  as 


CHRIST   DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  57 

the  inheritance  of  the  second  Adam  ;  3.  The  per- 
petual providence,  or  ceaseless  supply  of  life  and 
love  to  this  creation,  as  the  foundation  of  practical 
religion ;  4.  The  universal  brotherhood  and  unity 
of  the  race  of  man,  encompassing  all  the  divinely 
appointed  bounds  of  national  habitation,  as  the 
foundation  for  the  catholicity  of  the  church  ;  and, 
5.  The  fact  of  a  literal  and  personal  resurrection 
into  glory,  through  the  risen  Redeemer,  with  the 
correlative  fact  of  a  retributive  judgment.  The 
amazing  compass  of  these  brief  statements,  com- 
bined with  their  subtile  adaptation  to  the  various 
shades  of  speculation  and  feeling  on  the  spot,  to- 
gether with  their  logical  consecutiveness,  and  their 
rhetorical  beauty,  including  their  graceful  citation 
of  a  line  of  verse  from  Aratus,  found  also  almost 
word  for  word  in  Cleanthes,  these  make  up  the 
marvel  of  this  Christian  oration,  matchless  among 
all  the  orators.  Nothing  from  the  apostle  better 
justifies  Luther's  hyperbole,  *'  The  words  of  St. 
Paul  are  not  dead  words  ;  they  are  living  creatures 
and  have  hands  and  feet."  * 

*  One  further  expository  suggestion  only — if  it  may  be  par- 
doned— is  offered,  not  having  the  support,  so  far  as  I  know,  of 
any  of  the  critics.  They  have  universally  accounted  for  the  re- 
ference to  the  "  one  blood,"  or  unity  of  the  race,  by  the  arrogant 
pretension  of  the  Greeks  to  be  an  independent  national  product* 
sprung  up  on  their  own  soil — avrox^ovc'i.  Is  it  not,  however,  as 
likely — since  the  Jew,  wherever  he  came,  was  known  to  hold  an 
offensive  sense  of  superiority,  and  since,  as  Bentley  himself  ad- 
mits, the  same  claim  of  a  separate  origin  was  set  up  by  several 
other  ancient  tribes  besides  the  Greeks — that  this  was  only  an- 
other of  the  apostle's  conciliatory  overtures,  to  soften  prejudice, 
to  widen  the  ground  of  mutual  good-will,  towards  a  better  wel- 
come for  the  doctrine  he  has  yet  in  reserve  to  deliver? 


58  LECTURE    SECOND. 

The  discourse  ended,  the  day's  customary  ex- 
citement dies  away,  and  the  novelty-loving  city 
grows  still.  When  Xenophon  relates  the  recep- 
tion of  the  news  of  the  Greek  defeat  in  this  same 
metropolis,  at  the  end  of  the  Peloponnesian  war, 
he  writes,  with  simple  pathos,  that  ''  No  one  slept 
in  Athens  that  night."  ''^  Had  there  been  a  deeper 
penetration  into  the  true  hiding-places  of  a  peo- 
ple's strength,  and  the  real  signs  of  the  times^ 
a  more  awful  and  anxious  vigil  would  have  been 
kept  there,  now  that,  by  one  day's  preaching,  the 
Gospel  of  an  everlasting  commonwealth,  which 
subdues  and  outlasts  all  earthly  empires,  had  vir- 
tually conquered  pagan  philosophy  at  its  centre, 
unseating  it  from  its  stronghold. f 

*  See  Wordsworth's  "  Athens  and  Attica."  The  earlier  and 
original  authorities  as  to  the  localities  and  their  historical  and 
mythological  illustrations  are  the  ten  "Books  of  the  Itinerary" 
of  Pausanias  and  Cicero's  Letters. 

f  A  Continental  commentator  has  said  that  Paul  never 
preached  with  less  fruit  than  at  Athens.  Can  we  dare  say  that 
he  ever  preached  with  more?  The  moderately-sized  church 
standing  to-day  on  the  Areopagus,  dedicated  to  Dionysius,  the 
solitarj'  male  convert,  to  be  sure,  who  is  mentioned  in  the  narra- 
tive by  name,  the  first  bishop  of  Athens,  is  but  an  inadequate 
symbol  of  the  "sound  that  has  gone  out  into  all  the  earth" 
from  that  single  sermon.  They  that  search  anxiously  for 
historical  parallels  find  that  it  was  on  the  very  rock  where 
Paul  lifted  up  the  banner  of  the  cross  for  the  western  world  that 
the  Persians  pitched  their  encampment  when  they  besieged  the 
Acropolis  ;  and  that,  while  Xerxes  attempted  ineffectually  to  burn 
out  the  Greek  worship  by  setting  fire  to  its  temples,  Paul  under- 
mined it  in  the  minds  of  its  worshippers  ;  so  that  the  Parthenon 
itself,  still  standing,  was  at  last  ennobled  by  the  preaching  of 
another  "wisdom  and  power,"  and  converted  into  a  kind  of  sanc- 
tuary of  the  Son  of  God. 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  59 

The  great  scene  at  Mars'  Hill  passes  from  our 
view,  but  not  the  mighty  evidence  it  yields  that, 
in  every  nation,  humanity  at  its  highest  and  best, 
its  loftiest  culture  and  keenest  vision  of  nature,  is 
yet  a  creature  born  to  worship,  never  at  rest  till  it 
rests  at  the  cross,  finding  the  Father  through  the 
Son.  '"''  Whom  therefore  ye  ignorantly  worship, 
him  declare  I  unto  you,"  is  the  ceaseless  cry  of  the 
Gospel,  ''till  we  all  come  in  the  knowledge  of 
the  Son  of  God  unto  a  perfect  ifianJ'' 

All  round  us,  among  those  who  will  not  welcome 
''the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus,"  there  are  living  signs 
of  a  religious  sensibility,  tenacious  witnesses  in 
the  soul  that  it  somehow  seeks  the  Shepherd,  feel- 
ing blindly  after  him,  while  it  is  sought  by  him. 
Every  Christian  minister  will  recognize  them  ;  any 
penetrating  eye  can  discover  them.  The  spon- 
taneous acknowledgments  of  God  that  spring  to 
the  lips  of  irreligious  persons  in  swift  and  unpre- 
meditated syllables ;  the  awe  that  falls  on  the 
spirits  of  skeptics  in  great  sorrows  or  terrible  pro- 
vidences ;  the  prevalent  desire  of  profane  parents 
to  have  their  children  taught  at  church ;  the  send- 
ing for  the  clergyman  in  mortal  sickness,  or  at  the 
burial  of  the  dead,  by  scoffers  ;  irrepressible  pray- 
ers ;  a  lingering  respect  for  Christian  ordinances, 
Avhich  is  not  mere  fear  of  public  opinion ;  the 
power  of  Sunday,  which  is  more  than  secular  over 
even  secular  minds  ;  an  almost  universal  deference 
to  the  words  of  Scripture,  which  is  neither  intel- 
lectual nor  superstitious — each  of  these  is  one  of 
those  altars  to  the  iinknozun  God  Avhich  stand  on 
every  side  of  us,  their  very  inconsistency  with  the 


60  LECTURE    SECOND. 

unchristian  life  joined  with  them  making  them 
only  the  more  impressive  confirmations  of  the 
want  of  all  the  sons  of  men  for  the  Son  of  Man. 

Through  the  streets  of  Paris,  not  long  ago, 
there  moved  out  to  Pere  la  Chaise  a  funeral  pro- 
cession of  atheists.  It  halted  by  an  open  grave. 
There  was  no  hymn ;  for  atheism  was  never  yet  set 
to  music ;  no  prayer,  for  when  atheism  has  time 
to  consider  it  remembers  that  a  supplication  sent 
into  the  air  is  either  an  absurdity  or  a  surrender. 
Into  that  grave  was  let  down  the  mortal  part — 
all,  those  faithless  mourners  would  have  said — of 
a  woman  of  wit  and  beauty,  the  admired  sibyl 
of  a  well-known  brilliant  pagan  communistic  ora- 
cle speaking  through  France.  There  Avas  a  eu- 
logy. The  orator  praised  the  dead,  recommended 
communism,  pronounced  creation  a  dream,  and 
argued  that  there  is  no  immortality  and  no  God. 
Reaching  the  climax  of  his  impassioned  pane- 
gyric, swept  by  the  intensity  of  an  extemporaneous 
French  enthusiasm  beyond  the  bounds  of  an  arti- 
ficial materialism,  he  tossed  the  flowers  in  his  hand 
upon  the  coffin-lid  before  him,  exclaiming,  "  Pass 
on,  fair  spirit,  God  is  waiting  to  receive  thee  !  "  To 
the  stumbling,  stammering,  mourning  children  of 
humanity  in  Parisian  streets,  at  the  entry  of  the 
city,  in  human  habitations,  by  open  graves,  Chris- 
tendom cries,  in  the  wisdom  of  Christ,  "  Unto  you, 
O  men  !  I  call.  Whom  ye  ignorantly  worship,  him 
declare  I  unto  you." 

We  too,  here,  have  all  one  human  heart.  Look 
down  into  that.  In  its  deepest  places  are  there 
no  facts  that  cry  out  for  Christ,  and  so  bear  per- 


CHRIST  DISCLOSED    TO    MEN.  6 1 

petual  testimony  to  his  coming?  What  do  you 
make,  O  unbeliever,  of  yourself?  *'  How  readest 
thou,"  not  thy  Bible,  but  thy  own  breast,  that 
Bible  in  thee,  with  its  Old  Testament  of  law  and 
its  New  Testament  of  love  ?  Look  again.  There 
is  conscience,  with  all  its  bitter  accusations.  There 
is  remorse,  with  its  uncomforted  agonies.  There 
is  affection,  with  its  infinite,  mysterious  capacities 
of  pain.  There  is  an  instinct  of  Judgment,  fore- 
boding greater  possible  miseries  to  come.  There 
is  aspiration,  longing  for  unattained  heights  and 
glories  of  a  more  perfect  life — all  a  riddle  without 
interpretation  if  there  is  no  Divine  Man.  There 
is  bereavement  moaning  at  the  fresh  grave,  in- 
quiring, ''If  a  man  die,  shall  he  live  again?" 
There  is  the  natural  want  of  worship,  kindling  its 
altars  all  over  the  round  world,  listening  for  a  voice 
from  the  sky.  There  is  the  restless  and  perpetual 
'-'■  feeling  after  God,"  if  haply  it  may  find  him. 
What  do  they  all  mean?  Whence  come  they? 
Whither  do  they  reach?  Under  these  familiar 
words  lie  all  the  tragedy  and  glory,  the  shame  or 
the  splendor,  the  death  or  the  life  of  the  soul  of 
man.  What  would  all  Athenian  knowledge  and  art 
be  worth  to  you  or  me,  which,  after  it  had  reaped 
its  splendid  harvests  in  all  the  fields  of  nature, 
knew  no  Lord  at  whose  feet  it  could  lay  these 
treasures  down  ? 


LECTURE    III, 


gislrjetitt    "glxc  WioxXtX  auitlx0ttt 
Ijtltu^  atxtt  xoitU  |titu. 


"  0ntJ  to!)eit  t!)co  sato  !jim,  tljcj)  b)ors|)ijp|)cli  ijhn ;  but  some 

IroUbtcH/*— Matt.  8  :  17. 

"^nlr  some  ftelicbeti  t\)t  ttjinijs  h)|)icf)  lueve  spofeen,  antr  some 
beliebeo  not." — Acts  28 :  24. 

"STfje  toorltj  i)j)  iDistJom  kneto  not  ^otr*  .  .  .  ifot;  tlje  JctDS 
require  a  sifln,  anO  tt)e  CKreefes  seett  after  toislrom :  hut  lue  preaci) 
€:t)rist  crucifteU,  unto  ttje  Sctos  a  stuml3lin2=l)locft,  anti  unto  t!)e 
CSreefts  fooltsijness  ;  6ut  unto  t!)em  b3f)icl)  are  ralletJ,  ftotf)  iJeb3s 
anU  (Kreefes,  e|)rist,  tlje  potocr  of  CSfotr,  anH  ttje  totsUom  of  C5oti/»— 

1  Cor.  1 :  21-29 


©Itrist  in  tlx^  "^xtstnu  of 


Three  questions  lie  directly  across  the  path  of 
thoug-ht  where  we  are  moving.  They  must  be  an- 
swered, unless  we  are  willing  to  come  to  a  one- 
sided and  loose  conclusion. 

Granted  that  the  faith  of  Christ  is  fitted  to 
mankind,  how  do  we  know  that  the  world,  without 
Christ,  would  not  have  reached,  in  some  way,  what 
Christ  has  brought?  What  are  we  to  make 
of  the  fact  that,  when  he  and  his  religion  have 
come,  some  minds  have  always  doubted,  and 
others  have  vigorously  disbelieved  ?  And,  in  the 
propagation  of  this  Faith,  why  has  the  progress 
been  partial  and  unequal  ?  These  difficulties  chal- 
lenge explanation.  Inquiry  is  of  the  intellect ; 
and  we  shall  find,  I  believe,  that  though  it  is  as  a 
thinking  creature  that  man  first  raises  the  doubt, 
yet  afterwards,  if  he  is  fair  and  thinks  on,  he 
brings  the  value  of  his  doubt  to  trial. 

Before  you  is  a  piece  of  mechanism  ;  it  lies  in 
the  daylight.  It  is  complicated  ;  it  is  of  durable 
material ;  it  is  of  magnificent  dimensions,  and  of 
many  delicate  adjustments.  The  machine  is 
running.      Examining  it,  you  are  certain  of  two 


66  LECTURE    THIRD. 

things:  that  it  was  meant  to  do  a  particular 
work,  and  that  it  is  doing  that  work  badly.  We 
all  say,  then.  Something  is  wanting.  There  ap- 
pears at  our  side  a  man  who,  by  his  language  and 
his  touch,  seems  to  understand  the  principle  and 
the  construction.  He  speaks  as  if  he  might  have 
been  the  builder.  A  probability  arises  in  our 
minds  that  he  can  remedy  the  defects  which  he 
points  out,  and  can  accomplish  a  vast  and  gradual 
improvement  in  the  operation,  looking  with  prom- 
ise to  its  final  perfection.  He  makes  the  experi- 
ment. We  come  there  at  a  later  day,  and  we 
find  a  manifest  reduction  of  the  jars  and  fail- 
ures, with  a  marvellous  increase  of  the  original 
power  of  the  contrivance.  If  we  have  common 
sense  and  common  candor,  we  shall  say.  This 
mending  or  remaking  is  due  to  that  mender  or 
remaker.  Here  are  cause  and  effect.  His  claim 
to  the  belief  of  machinists  and  of  all  people  is 
justified.  It  matters  nothing  at  all  what  theories 
the  most  ingenious  minds  may  frame  about  the 
origin,  or  the  nature,  or  the  proper  cure,  of  the 
disorder  in  the  mechanism.  It  matters  nothing 
now  whether  certain  accounts  and  letters  written 
about  this  person  were  in  every  respect  correct, 
or  have  been  properly  copied  and  kept.  It  mat- 
ters still  less  whether  the  opinions  of  certain  dis- 
tinguished engineers  as  to  the  intentions  of  this 
master  or  the  performance  of  his  subordinates  and 
successors  are  warranted.  The  thing  wanted  was 
done.  There  stands  the  restored  construction — 
visible,  tangible,  solid,  and  running  Avell.  That 
master  restored  it. 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         67 

I  do  no  dishonor  to  human  nature  when  I  so 
figure  it  as  a  product  of  intelligent  design.  Be- 
fore that  Life  appeared  which  was  lived  between 
Bethlehem  and  Calvary,  it  was  the  mechanism  in 
disorder,  the  instrument  out  of  tune.  We  are  now 
to  trace  the  proofs  that  the  hand  which  healed 
was  the  hand  that  made  it.  Drop,  then,  the  me- 
chanical figure.  There  is  a  spirit  in  man,  and 
the  inspiration  of  the  Almighty  giveth  him  under- 
standing. 

I.  We  shall  have  to  admit  that  till  Christ  comes 
man  does  not  find  what  he  needs  or  even  know 
by  his  understanding  what  he  wants.  As  the 
Master  of  Humanity,  Christ  first  interprets  the 
want,  and  makes  it  consciously  distinct  before 
he  satisfies  it.  This  law  is  seen  to  govern  the 
Saviour's  ministry  to  persons  in  Judea,  both  in 
miracle  -and  teaching ;  and  it  appears  with  equal 
brightness  in  all  the  vast  historical  movements  by 
which  he  draws  the  race  into  his  kingdom. 

Any  exhaustive  enumeration  of  the  signs  of  dis- 
order in  the  non-Christian  world,  signs  that  human 
nature  without  the  Saviour  worked  badly,  is  be- 
yond the  limits  of  these  lectures.  I  can  only  af- 
firm to  my  audience  that  the  sources  of  accurate 
and  definite  knowledge  on  that  first  point  are 
accessible,  and  that  all  trustworthy  scholarship  is 
agreed  as  to  their  authenticity.*  On  these  we 
may  rest  several  distinct  propositions,  made  neces- 

*  The  most  recent  accurate  account  of  the  public  and  pri- 
vate life  of  human  society  at  the  advent  of  Christ,  from  original 
sources  of  information,  may  be  found  in  Prof,  Fisher's  "  Be 
ginnings  of  Christianity." 


68  LECTURE    THIRD. 

sarily    concise,   touching  for    the   most   part  the 
greater  subjects  of  man's  intellectual  concern. 

You  will  observe  that  amidst  the  entire  circuit 
of  that  heathen  life  there  run  two  streams :  first, 
the  broad  river  of  moral  and  intellectual  failure, 
but  parallel  with  that,  or  amidst  it,  a  slender 
and  yet  persevering  and  most  striking  current  of 
human  longing  for  something  better — aspirations 
for  an  unattained  illumination,  springing  from 
a  haunting  consciousness  of  some  hidden  capacity 
of  good  never  unfolded.  At  considerable  inter- 
vals you  see  these  tokens  of  a  deep  and  restless 
want  in  all  the  ante-evangelical  literature  and  art. 
You  hear  their  half-articulate  wail  or  melancholy 
undertone  in  the  Greek  tragedies  and  epics,  in  the 
lyric  poetry  of  the  East,  in  the  loftier  meditations 
of  Athenian  and  Latin  philosoph}^  The  same  un- 
satisfied yearning  for  truth,  for  certainty,  for  con- 
solation, is  carved  into  marble,  built  into  pyra- 
mids, and  framed  into  temples.  So  that,  while 
we  draw  one  and  the  same  conclusion,  we  draw 
it  from  two  apparently  opposite  classes  of  ancient 
testimonials — those  that  testify  to  constant  error 
and  degradation  on  the  one  hand,  and  those  that 
witness  to  a  frequent  but  blind  reaching  after  the 
completeness  in  Christ,  which  makes  so  wonder- 
fully descriptive  his  title  in  prophecy,  "  the  Desire 
of  all  nations,"  on  the  other.  Both  declare  with 
voices  unutterably  and  most  pathetically  sad,  that 
humanity  needed  Christ,  and  was  waiting  for  him 
when  he  came. 

Let  the  following  positions,  then,  stand  in  order : 
I.  In  no  one  nation  of  antiquity,  in  no  one  non- 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT        69 

Christian  corner  of  the  earth  since,  was  there 
ever  a  steady  and  lasting  advance  in  moral  and 
intellectual  life.  There  has  been  no  permanent 
non-Christian  civilization.  Always  there  was  re- 
cession after  progress,  decay  after  vitality,  eclipse 
after  brilliancy. 

2.  No  people  was  ever  lifted  out  of  barbarism, 
none  was  ever  regenerated  or  vitalized,  by  its  own 
force,  or  from  within  itself;  but  every  people  only 
by  the  coming  in  and  coming  down  upon  it  of  a 
quickening  power  from  without  and  from  above. 
So  profound  a  reader  of  the  past  as  Niebuhr  says 
emphatically :  ''  Civilization  is  never  indigenous  ;  it 
is  an  exotic  plant  wherever  it  is  found."  Herder 
says:  "No  man  has  the  birth  of  his  mind,  any 
more  than  the  birth  of  his  body,  through  himself 
alone."  Lord  Bacon  says  it.  The  fable  of  Prome- 
theus and  other  myths  confessed  it  on  the  spot 
where  the  natural  fire  burnt  brightest.  Then  it 
follows  that  originally,  if  you  carry  back  the 
search  for  your  regenerating  power  from  one  coun- 
try to  another,  you  must  find  it,  at  last,  in  an  upper 
country,  i.e.^  in  Him  who  comes  from  above  the 
world  into  it ;  and  "  He  that  descended  is  the  same 
also  that  ascended  up  far  above  all  heavens,  that 
he  might  fill  all  things." 

3.  It  is  now  the  settled  judgment  of  competent 
judges  that  in  heathendom,  with  exceptions  too 
insignificant  to  be  taken  into  account,  all  nations, 
all  tribes,  have  worshipped  ;  that  man  is  a  worship- 
ping creature,  has  an  inborn  sense  of  a  superior 
agency  or  a  stronger  force  than  himself,  generally 


70  LECTURE    THIRD, 


a  person  or  persons.*  In  our  day  travel  and  voy- 
age have  virtually  completed  the  exploration  of  the 
planet,  and  their  verdict  is  that  it  is  extremely 
doubtful  if  there  is  an  absolutely  non-religious  com- 
munity, even  among  the  Bushmen  of  South  Africa. 
Yet  worship  never  combined  the  three  traits  to- 
gether, of  being  equally  suited  to  all  classes,  of 
elevating  and  purifying  the  moral  life,  and  of  satis- 
fying the  worshipper  as  his  intelligence  increased, 
except  in  Christianity. 

4.  The  idea  of  a  divine  Fatherhood,  central  to 
Christianity,  was  absent  from  every  non-Christian 
religion ;  and  yet  the  parental  instinct,  in  its 
mighty  and  tender  energy,  is  universal — natural 
religion  thus  missing  what  it  wanted  most. 

5.  Recent  psychological  and  experimental  sci- 
ence has  decided  that  the  average  man  ever}^- 
where  has  four  instincts,  which  may  be  considered 
as  the  foundation  of  all  natural  religion :  the 
instinct  of  somewhat  or  some  one  above  himself  ; 
the  instinct  of  immortality,  or  continued  existence  ; 
the  instinct  of  conscience,  or  of  a  law  of  right  and 
wrong,  as  obligatory  upon  him  ;  and,  as  a  conse- 
quence of  that,  the  instinct  of  alarm  or  foreboding, 
as  the  effect  of  doing  wrong.  These  are  unwritten 


*  "  Obliged  as  I  am,  even  by  my  education,  to  pass  in  review  the 
races  of  men,  I  have  sought  for  theism  in  the  lowest  and  in  the 
highest,  but  nowhere  have  I  met  with  it,  except  in  an  individual, 
or  at  most  in  some  school  of  men,  more  or  less  known,  as  we 
have  seen  in  Europe  in  the  last  century,  and  as  we  see  at  the 
present  day.  Everywhere  and  always  the  masses  of  the  people  have 
escaped  it.'' — M.  Quatrefages,  cited  by  the  Archbishop  of  York  in 
his  "  Limits  of  Philosophical  Inquiry." 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         7 1 

prophecies.     All  the  four  stand  in  the  front  of  the 
four  Gospels. 

6.  While  the  cleverest  ancient  thinkers  included 
among  their  beliefs,  and  oftener  among-  their  con- 
jectures, that  of  a  life  after  death,  there  is  not  the 
slightest  evidence  that  the  idea  of  immortality  had 
any  practical  influence  whatever,  either  in  check- 
ing vice  and  crime,  or  in  encouraging  spirituality, 
a  circumstance  which  goes  far  to  account  for  the 
place  given  to  the  resurrection  in  the  first  plant- 
ing of  the  Christian  Church.  '  It  was  the  one  doc- 
trine put  with  the  divine  name  in  the  first  preach- 
ing: ''  Christ  and  the  resurrection." 

7.  Judging  by  authenticated  descriptions  of 
ancient  society,  and  by  the  morals  attributed  in 
mythology  to  the  gods,  conscience  was  both  van- 
quished and  corrupted  everywhere.  Of  the  Chris- 
tian ethics,  after  all  the  opportunities  of  eighteen 
hundred  years  to  outgrow  it  or  to  fault  it,  a  stu- 
dent who,  if  not  a  reluctant  is  certainly  not  an 
interested  witness,  says  to  his  friends  the  ration- 
alists, "  The  morality  of  the  New  Testament  is  sci- 
entific and  perfect."* 

8.  While  the  prevalence  oi  expiatory  sacrifices 
in  paganism  was  proof  enough  of  a  vaguely  felt 
necessity  for  pardon,  there  was  no  conception, 
there  was  no  dream,  of  a  propitiation,  which,  like 
the  cross,  betokened  the  love  of  the  Deity,  or  which 
revealed  the  first  movement  of  reconciliation  as 
stirring  in  the  divine  heart,  or  which  drew  the  dis- 
ciple, by  the  sympathy  of  voluntary  suffering,  into 

*  Mr.  R.  W.  Emerson. 


72 


LECTURE    THIRD. 


a  likeness  to  the  spirit  he  Avorshipped.  And 
therefore  the  theologian  is  right  who  lately  said  : 
"  Christianity,  and  it  only,  as  a  scheme  of  thought, 
shows  how  man  may  look  on  all  God's  attributes 
at  once,  and  be  at  peace" — his  terrible  justice  and 
his  tender  mercy. 

9.  Among  the  better  mmds  before  the  Christian 
era  there  was  an  enlarging  idea  of  some  principle 
of  social  order  that  should  become  universal  and 
unify  nations  under  a  single  rule  ;  and  hence  the 
enormous  comprehension  of  the  Roman  empire, 
just  before  the  nativity  at  Bethlehem,  stretching 
from  the  East  Indies  to  the  Atlantic,  forcing  a 
military  peace,  shutting  the  gates  of  Janus,  hold- 
ing the  populations  of  the  earth  to  the  imperial 
throne  in  one  Jiand — a  hand  which,  if  not  gentle,  was 
firm,  and  watching  them  with  an  eye  which,  if  not 
friendly,  was  all-seeing  on  the  surface  ;  this,  though 
a  very  metallic,  coarse,  and  heartless  symbol,  was 
still  a  symbol  singularly  prophetic  of  that  more 
glorious  empire — one,  eternal,  just  and  merciful 
— where  the  kingdoms  of  this  world  should  become 
the  kingdom  of  the  Lord. 

10.  Man  abhors  slavery.  Slavery  hurts  what  in 
him  is  most  human.  The  welfare  of  humanity  is 
bound  up  with  its  freedom.  The  new  spirit  acts  for 
liberty,  however,  not  on  the  political  structure 
directly,  but  on  the  ruling  men  who,  in  the  long- 
run,  make  the  government  despotic  or  free.  It  is 
De  Tocqueville,  the  publicist,  not  any  professed 
preacher,  who  says,  "  Christianity  is  the  compan- 
ion of  liberty  in  all  its  conflicts,  the  cradle  of  its 
infancy,  and  the  divine  source  of  all  its  claims." 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         73 

It  is  Guizot,  not  a  theologian  but  a  civilian  and 
statesman,  who  writes  the  work  which  proves  the 
Christian  faith  to  be  the  fountain  of  free  institu- 
tions. This  position  is  not  weakened  by  the  fact 
that  the  Church  has  generally  arrayed  no  organized 
opposition  against  political  serfdom  or  servitude. 
From  the  first,  it  received  from  the  Saviour  a  dif- 
ferent commission ;  and  it  went  about  its  healing 
work  by  touching  not  the  branches  of  the  tree 
but  its  roots.  It  knew,  and  it  has 'made  the  world 
confess,  that  its  principle  of  the  brotherhood  of  all 
men,  with  one  Father,  where  justice  and  love  are 
the  reigning  forces ;  where  there  is  neither  bond 
nor  free,  male  nor  female,  having  separate  rights 
— ''  a  great  Christian  commonwealth  where  all  are 
one  in  Christ" — must  in  the  end  bring  liberty  with 
it  to  every  class.  The  early  Christian  monks  re- 
fused to  be  waited  on  by  slaves.  The  Church  w^as 
the  slave's  sanctuary,  where  the  owner's  hand, 
lifted  to  strike,  was  held  off.  The  primitive  mis- 
sionaries *'  never  lost  an  opportunity  of  redeeming 
slaves.  Ecclesiastical  legislation  declared  the 
slave  to  be  a  man,  not  a  chattel ;  laid  it  down  as  a 
rule  that  his  life  was  his  own,  not  to  be  taken 
without  a  trial,  and  it  shut  out  from  the  commun- 
ion the  master  v/ho  murdered  his  serf."^^  That 
was  a  clarion  of  emancipation  that  rang  far  down 
into  the  soul  of  humanity  when  the  Lord  said,  in 
the  hearing  of  the  frightened  Pharisees  and 
tyrants  of  Jerusalem,  '*  If  the  Son  shall  make  you 
free,  ye  shall  be  free  indeed" — and  no  man  laid 
hands  on  him. 

^  Bishop  Harold  Brown. 


74  LECTURE    THIRD. 

II.  Whoever  thinks  imagmes.  Imagination,  in 
its  broader  sense,  is  the  creative  faculty.  Creation 
by  man  is  art — the  art  of  beauty  or  design.  Does 
Christianity  recognize  this  department  also  of 
man's  mind  ? 

Turn  to  the  Master  himself,  taking  with  you 
the  three  great  principles  of  artistic  work.  First, 
there  is  intense  sympathy  with  nature.  In 
three  years  of  most  anxious  and  suffering  labor  in 
the  august  purpose  of  re-creating  the  conscience 
and  soul  of  the  race,  speaking  only  a  few  brief 
addresses  that  are  known  to  the  world,  Christ 
nevertheless  so  blends  his  life  with  the  scenery  of 
his  native  land  and  sky,  and  so  weaves  the  living 
and  growing  things  of  the  earth  into  the  expres- 
sion of  his  spirit,  that  thenceforth  Palestine  is  in- 
separable from  Jesus,  and  the  Gospel  and  nature 
are  set  into  eternal  harmony.  Men  have  agreed 
to  call  the  language  that  does  that  ''  poetry." 
Another  essential  artistic  principle  is  the  presenta- 
tion of  an  original  ideal  under  images  and  materials  • 
that  are  common  and  familiar.  Christ's  original 
ideal  is  a  character  Avhere  such  opposites  as  gen- 
tleness and  power,  self-subjection  and  personal 
authority,  frankness  and  reserve,  spotless  purity 
and  sympathy  with  the  sinful,  pity  and  indignation, 
sensibility  and  courage,  are  mingled  without  one 
stroke  of  discord  ;  and  every  image  and  color  of 
which  that  majestic  figure  is  composed  is  taken 
from  things  familiar  in  the  houses  and  streets  and 
farms  of  the  people. 

Still  another  principle  of  the  most  perfect  pro- 
ductions in  art  is  unity  in  variety.    You  study  the 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         75 

words  of  the  Saviour,  from  the  baptism  at  the  Jor- 
dan to  the  mysterious  predictions  and  farewells 
of  the  paschal  night.  The  range  of  subjects,  the 
diversity  of  illustration,  the  contrasts  of  tone  and 
style,  are  as  boundless  as  the  life  of  the  world  that 
now  is  and  of  eternity.  Yet  no  thinker  ever  thinks 
of  Christ  as  having  but  a  single  aim  in  all  he  ever 
did  or  spoke. 

Can  wc  wonder,  then,  that  his  religion  from  the 
first  has  satisfied  that  sense  of  beauty  which  never 
quite  forsakes  men  anywhere,  and  which  rises 
and  is  refined  in  them  as  their  whole  estate  is  ex- 
alted ?  Can  we  wonder  that  this  holy  Faith,  stern 
in  morality  and  solemn  in  prospect  as  it  is,  should 
welcome  the  ministry  of  what  is  beautiful  in  shape 
or  color  or  sound,  if  only  it  keeps  its  ministerial 
place,  and  glorifies  without  materializing  the  spirit- 
ual realities  of  that  unseen  Kingdom  which  is,  after 
all,  within  and  above  ?  From  the  moment  Christ 
took  our  flesh  and  slept  on  his  mother's  arm  at 
Bethlehem,  to  his  last  agony.  Christian  art  has 
preached  him  to  the  nations.  Can  we  recall  one 
signal  incident  in  all  his  sacrificial  way  to  which 
it  has  not  brought  an  interpretation  for  the  under- 
standing or  a  persuasion  for  the  heart?  Some- 
times, to  be  sure,  it  has  been  a  Rubens,  sensualiz- 
ing the  soul — as  what  instinct  of  God  may  not 
depravity  degrade  ?  But  oftener  it  has  been  the 
Angelico,  who,  every  day,  when  he  renewed  his 
work  on  his  picture  of  the  crucifixion,  shed  tears 
of  faith  and  love.  You  might  pull  down,  in  a  mis- 
erable iconoclasm,  from  the  walls  of  Christian  gal- 
leries and  dwellings  all  these  pictured  sermons  of 


76  LECTURE    THIRD. 

your  Saviour's  redemption  :  to  be  sure  you  would 
not  shake  the  cross,  or  take  its  saving  virtue  from 
one  drop  of  the  precious  blood,  or  blot  a  feature 
from  the  face  of  the  Son  of  God ;  but  you  would 
bury  a  perfume  which  our  better  humanity  has 
scattered  on  the  air  of  the  world  with  the  Gospel 
— a  tribute  to  him  who  did  not  forbid  his  Evangel- 
ist to  mention  of  the  alabaster-box  that  it  was 
costly,  and  that  he  accepted  it.  Sculpture  has 
done  less  for  the  Faith  ;  and  the  Church  might 
learn  from  that  how  this  religion  of  the  spirit 
always  subordinates  form  to  life  ;  for  statuary  is 
to  painting  what  winter  landscapes  are  to  summer. 
The  life  is  there,  but  it  is  frozen.  ^'  The  letter 
killeth,  but  the  spirit  giveth  life."  You  might 
shear  off  all  the  spires  and  towers  of  Christian 
architecture  from  the  scenery  of  the  planet ;  you 
would  only  dwarf  the  cedars  of  Lebanon  into  a 
field  of  stumps  ;  you  would  not  kill  the  root. 
You  might  silence  the  anthems  and  oratorios  of 
Christian  music,  sung  by  the  genius  of  Germany, 
Italy,  and  England  ;  but  the  ear  of  Christendom 
would  listen  still,  through  all  the  feasts  and  vigils 
to  come,  for  some  strains  of  its  ''  Creation,"  its 
"  Messiah" — songs  of  Moses  and  Elijah,  of  David 
and  Isaiah,  and  Patmos — to  be  sung  once  more. 
We  cannot  be  Avrong  in  saying  that  our  religion 
is  humian  in  accepting  the  service  of  beauty  in  the 
arts. 

12.  In  the  spiritual  sphere,  the  element  above 
nature,  that  something  which  all  people  feel  and 
most  people  acknowledge  as  belonging  to  the  un- 
seen, was  for  the  first  time  made  to  harmonize 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT         'J  J 

with  nature,  in  Christ's  ministry.  There  we  find 
nature  and  the  supernatural  flowing  together  ;  we 
pass,  in  reading  the  New  Testament  story,  from 
the  ordinary  to  the  miraculous,  and  from  the 
miraculous  back  to  common  life,  following  Jesus 
and  his  apostles,  without  a  break  or  a  jar.  There 
is  nothing  like  this  in  any  m}' thology.  Earth  and 
heaven  were  never  so  brought  together  as  when 
the  Son  of  God,  from  heaven,  stands  among  men. 
Nay,  more  ;  in  the  same  revelation,  the  space  up- 
wards between  man  and  God  is  filled  up  with  super- 
human life.  If  we  start  at  the  bottom  of  all  animated 
existence,  its  lowest  grade,  and  move  up  from  the 
monad  towards  man,  natural  science  shows  us 
the  steps  of  an  unbroken  gradation.  Rank  by 
rank  the  living  creatures  rise,  in  one  majestic 
order  of  creation,  from  the  first  cellular  tissue  that 
was  built,  to  Newton,  to  Shakespeare,  to  Fenelon. 
And  every  order,  by  its  own  structure  and  organs^ 
to  the  scientific  eye,  predicts  the  one  coming  next 
above  it.  All  along  you  trace  signs  of  anticipation, 
of  something  greater,  of  a  loftier  kind  of  creature 
than  the  one  }■  ou  see.  A  voice  out  of  the  rocks, 
out  of  the  sea,  out  of  the  slime  of  sedgy  pools,  and 
the  shadows  of  forests,  and  the  clefts  of  the  wilder- 
ness, cries  forever :  *'  After  me  cometh  one  might- 
ier than  I."  Given  the  lowest,  the  highest  must 
be.  Given  your  monad,  man  must  be.  But  is  man 
your  "  highest"?  Is  that  immense  interval  which 
stretches  between  Newton  and  the  Almighty 
One  an  unpeopled  waste  ?  Does  your  steadily 
ascending  scale  stop  at  the  mortal  line,  leaving 
all    the    upper    spaces   of   the    universe    empty 


yS  LECTURE    THIRD. 

this  side  of  God  ?  Does  this  look  like  the  fulfil- 
ment of  law  ?  Granted  that  man  is  the  crown 
and  summit  of  nature,  yet  there  haunts  his  breast 
an  unquenchable  sense  of  a  vast  and  living  world 
above  him,  reaching  all  the  way  to  the  foot  of  the 
throne.  Leibnitz,  with  his  searching  vision,  saw  it. 
"Nature,"  he  says,  ''never  makes  a  leap."  And 
what  science,  or  man  at  his  best  intellectual 
estate  concludes,  the  Gospel  reveals.  That  spirit- 
ual world  stands  open,  and  its  inhabitants — angels 
and  archangels,  cherubim  and  seraphim — are 
visible,  moving,  ministering,  worshipping.  From 
the  first  patriarch  to  the  last  apostle,  Bible-men 
behold  them.  And  he  on  whom  they  are  seen 
ascending  and  descending  is  the  Son  of  Man.''^ 

II.  Observe  how  this  religion  is  comprehensive. 

The  East  and  the  West  of  antiquity  were  not 
more  contrasted  in  their  geography  or  their  tem- 
perament than  in  their  habit  of  religious  thinking 
or  their  theory  of  man's  relation  to  the  other 
world.  They  started  from  opposite  points,  and 
the  difference  clung  to  them  all  the  way,  in  pro- 
cess and  conclusion.  To  the  oriental  mind  the 
conception  of  religion  was  that  of  the  divine 
world  coming  down  to  the  human.  The  move- 
ment begins  at  the  upper  end  of  the  line.  God 
or  the  gods  must  make  a  demonstration,  having 
mankind  for  its  objective  point.     There  is  first 

*  "Each  step  is  a  revolution  in  one  point  of  view  ;  but  then 
the  lower  state  prepared  itself  for  the  higher,  prophesied,  so  to 
speak,  of  its  coming,  and  the  higher  seated  itself  so  easily  on  the 
throne  prepared  for  it  that  we  do  not  wonder  to  find  it  there." — 
"  Design  in  Nature,"  by  W.  Thomson,  D.D. 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         79 

conceived  a  supernatural  sphere,  occupied  by 
deities  or  aeons,  one  emanating  or  derived  from 
another,  often  in  couples,  in  a  descending  series. 
This  upper  universe  has  a  kind  of  completeness  in 
itself.  Whether  Persian  or  Chinese  or  Indian  or 
Egyptian,  the  system  builds  itself  on  ideas  of  a 
heavenly  hierarchy  or  family,  independent  of  hu- 
manity. Be  man  what  he  may,  or  where  he  may, 
the  celestial  orders  have  their  own  domain  and 
their  own  genealogies.  If  man  is  lifted  up  out  of 
his  abjectness  at  all,  it  must  be  by  a  condescension 
which  first  stretches  its  arms  downward  from 
above. 

With  Western  thought,  on  the  other  hand,  man 
was  set  to  climb  upward,  with  such  help  as  he 
could  get,  towards  the  gods,  perhaps  into  a  god. 
Olympus  takes  its  coloring  and  shaping  from 
mortal  preconceptions.  A  deity  is  a  man  or 
w^oman  with  ever}-  faculty  and  passion  enlarged, 
except  those  which  Christ  shows  to  be  most  really 
godlike.  The  movement  starts  now  at  the  bottom 
of  the  line.  The  East,  i.e.,  in  religion,  sees  this 
world  touched  and  more  or  less  irradiated  by  the 
sun-fire  of  the  skies.  The  West  sees  humanity 
struggling  and  fighting  its  way  heavenward,  and 
when  it  gets  there,  taking  a  great  deal  that  is  of 
the  earth,  and  very  earthy,  with  it.  The  East 
humanizes  its  God ;  the  West  deifies  or  apotheo- 
sizes man. 

Is  it  not  very  easy  for  us  all,  then,  to  see  how 
the  religion  of  Christ,  and  that  alone,  Avith  its  equal 
adapation  to  Orient  and  Occident  alike,  takes 
both  these  diverse  tendencies  together  and  makes 


8o  LECTURE    THIRD. 

one  Faith  for  the  world  ?  "  He  who  ascended  is 
the  same  also  that  descended."  "  The  Word  is 
made  flesh."  "  I,  if  I  be  Hfted  up,  will  draw  all 
men  unto  me."  ''Now  are  ye,"  sons  of  men,  "  the 
sons  of  God."  ''  Hereafter  ye  shall  see  the  angels 
of  God  ascending-  and  descending  upon  the  Son 
of  man."  These  are  some  of  the  marvellous  decla- 
rations of  that^lorious  unity  in  which  the  incar- 
nation of  our  Lord  becomes  the  bond  of  our  race. 
''  That  in  the  dispensation  of  the  fulness  of  times 
he  might  gather  together  in  one  all  things  in 
Christ,  both  which  are  in  heaven  and  which  are 
on  earth,  even  in  him— far  above  every  name 
that  is  named,  not  only  in  this  world  but  also 
in  that  which  is  to  come,  and  gave  him  to  be 
head  over  all  things  to  the  church,  which  is  his 
body,  the  fulness  of  him  that  filleth  all  in  all." 

III.  Here,  however,  we  meet  the  contradiction 
of  unbelief.  This  is  not  the  place  to  deal  with 
the  value  of  the  skeptic's  arguments,  but  only  with 
his  doubt  or  denial  taken  in  itself  as  a  phenome- 
non in  fact.  When  Christ  was  alive  among  his 
countrymen,  working  his  wonders,  healing  their 
diseases,  there  were  those  whom  this  divine  spec- 
tacle of  charity  did  not  charm  or  convince. 
The  Scripture  tells  us  this,  with  sublime  candor, 
never  caring  to  make  out  a  case  by  hiding  any 
reality.  ''  Some  doubted."  The  line  of  doubters 
has  lengthened,  down  from  Celsus  and  Cerinthus 
to  the  protean  skepticism  conspicuous  in  the  liter- 
ary countries  of  Europe,  with  its  importations 
and  imitations  in  America.  What  account  is  to 
be   given   of  them,   if  it   be   true   that   man,   by 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         8  I 

virtue    of    his    humanity,    wants    Christ   and    his 
rehgion  ? 

First,  and  most  emphatically,  among-  all  attacks 
on  the  Christian  Faith,  in  any  age,  only  in  very 
rare  and  exceptional  cases  has  the  assault  been 
upon  Christ  himself,  upon  his  own  character  as 
a  person,  or  upon  that  type  of  character  which  it 
was  the  supreme  object  of  the  Saviour  to  create 
in  mankind.  We  have  now  in  our  hands  the  ma- 
terials for  a  complete  history  of  skeptical  thought 
from  the  beginning ;  indeed,  it  has  been  compe- 
tently written,  fifteen  years  ago,  in  one  of  the 
courses  of  lectures  at  Oxford,  from  which  this 
lectureship  takes  its  syllabus  of  subjects/'"  Noth- 
ing is  more  remarkable  in  that  history  than  that 
amidst  the  varied  shapes  of  infidelity  the  assail- 
ants, by  a  vast  majority,  have  directed  their 
criticism  against  other  points  than  the  heart  of 
the  spiritual  system  in  the  person  of  our  Lord.f 
You  have  to  remember  how  manifold  those  other 
points  are,  in  a  system  which  involves  elements 
so  complicated  as  these  :  a  body  of  writings  made 
up  of  sixty-six  distinct  compositions  by  almost  as 
many  writers,  all  unlike  each  other,  produced  in 

*  "A  Critical  History  of  Free  Thought,"  by  Adam  Storey 
Farrar,  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Queen's  College,  Oxford.     Cf.  Leck)^ 

f  An  apparent  exception  might  be  alleged  to  exist  in  the  rib- 
aldry and  blasphemy  of  the  French  atheists  of  the  last  century. 
But  a  more  careful  inquiry  will  show  that  with  nearly  the  entire 
school  that  grew  up  about  Voltaire,  Diderot,  and  the  Encyclo- 
pedic, in  Paris,  as  well  as  at  the  court  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
the  declared  reasons  of  disbelief  lay  in  the  regions  of  philosophy, 
politics,  and  the  passions,  and  remote  from  the  real  substance  of 
the  Religion  of  the  New  Testament. 


82  LECTURE     THIRD. 

different  countries,  in  different  languages,  at  inter- 
vals of  time  extending  over  a  period  of  nearly 
two  thousand  years,  belonging  to  all  departments 
of  literature,  full  of  dates  and  figures,  and  touch- 
ing nearly  every  topic  of  human  concern  and 
many  nations  of  the  time ;  then,  the  histories  and 
peculiarities  of  a  large  number  of  persons  living 
in  a  remote  age  ;  then,  elaborate  S3^stems  of  law, 
opinion,  and  ritual ;  then,  a  series  of  external  acts, 
some  of  them  miraculous,  running  through  the 
whole  period  and  surrounding  the  person  of  Christ 
himself ;  then,  the  minor  teachings  or  doctrines ; 
then,  the  circumstances  that  attended  the  planting 
of  a  great  institution,  the  church,  in  many  lands ; 
and,  lastly,  the  subsequent  historic  incidents  grow- 
ing out  of  this  Faith.  Must  it  not  necessarily  be  that 
a  Christianity  including  all  this,  however  adapted 
its  main  and  central  figure  might  be  to  human 
needs,  would  provoke,  everywhere  and  always,  in 
countless  details,  that  critical  and  skeptical  faculty 
which  is  a  part  also  of  man's  constitution,  and  is 
undoubtedly  one  of  the  instruments  given  him 
for  distinguishing  what  is  true  from  what  is  false  ? 
Again,  man  in  his  organization  is  not  simple  but 
composite.  And  whatever  his  deeper  nature  in 
its  more  deliberate  and  rational  exercise  might 
demand,  it  is  evident  that  in  the  realm  of  both  his 
passions  and  his  interests  there  must  always  be 
counter-currents  of  desire.  So  the  love  of  mortal 
life  is  clearly  a  permanent  and  universal  trait  of 
mankind  ;  yet,  in  some  moods,  under  certain  illu- 
sions— for  pleasure,  for  money,  from  sheer  audacity 
— life  is  sacrificed.     It  is  evident  that  the  Gospel, 


CHI  ST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.  Z^y 

precisely  because  it  does  fit  man  as  to  the  high 
ends  for  which  he  was  made,  crosses  and  vexes 
him  as  to  his  inferior  incUnations,  and  hence,  on 
the  moral  side,  there  always  is,  and  always  must 
be,  in  sensuality,  in  avarice,  in  every  selfish  pro- 
pensity, a  tremendous  motive  to  reject  Christi- 
anity itself,  and  to  dispute  its  credentials.  The 
religion  claims  obedience,  and  will  accept  no 
divided  empire  over  the  affections  and  the  will. 
The  real  wonder  will  be,  Avhen  we  measure  the 
pressure  of  this  conflict,  not  that  unbelief  has 
been  persistent  or  prevalent  or  ingenious,  but 
that  it  has  been  held  Avithin  the  bounds  which 
have  actually  restrained  it.  On  the  intellectual 
side,  for  the  very  reason  that  the  Gospel  has 
conquered,  there  is  to  a  certain  style  of  mind 
a  fascination  in  the  bare  idea  of  seeing  through 
it  or  defying  its  power.  The  history  of  free 
thought  proves  that  in  this  impatience  of  au- 
thority, this  pride  of  an  independent  reason, 
this  ambition  of  the  autocracy  of  the  brain,  has 
been  a  principal  origin  of  each  of  the  heresies  and 
denials — Gnostic,  encyclopsedic,  philosophic,  sci- 
entific, and  even  mystic.  The  unbeliever  meas- 
ures his  private  mental  force  against  the  common 
belief  in  the  most  imperious  and  unyielding  de- 
mand ever  proclaimed.  The  tempter  says,  *'Ye 
shall  be  as  gods  ;"  and  what  ungodly  mind  would 
not  be  a  god  if  it  could  ? 

A  third  reply  to  the  objection  named  is  that  the 
Religion  of  Christ  has  been  again  and  again  dis- 
carded on  account  of  the  foreign  matter  affixed  by 
superstition  and  misconception  to  its  original  sub- 


84  LECTURE    THIRD. 

stance.  Nothing  is  sadder  to  the  student  of  skepti- 
cism than  the  constant  return  of  this  discovery. 
Nearly  every  form  of  continental  infidelity  has 
mistaken  a  mediseval  and  half-mythologized  Chris- 
tianity for  the  pure  and  primitive  faith  of  Jesus 
and  St.  Paul.  Even  among  the  scholarly  skeptics 
now  living  there  is  more  than  one  Avhose  entire 
negation  proceeds  on  assumptions  that  would  be 
impossible  if  the  skeptic  had  ever  understood 
either  the  primitive  theology  or  the  New  Testa- 
ment itself.  It  is  the  dismal  swing  of  the  pendu- 
lum over  a  frightfully  wide  arc — from  error  to 
blank  atheism,  from  False  Decretals  to  Wolfen- 
biittel  Fragments,  from  Calvin  to  Rousseau,  from 
the  Vatican  to  nihilism,  from  Mariolatry  and  saint- 
worship  to  no  worship  at  all.  Before  reckoning 
the  weight  of  unbelief  against  the  fitness  of  the 
Gospel  for  man,  Ave  must  deduct  the  momentum 
of  this  extravagant  recoil. 

Fourthly,  however,  the  recoil  always  has  its 
limits.  The  proportion  of  doubt  and  faith,  wher- 
ever there  "is  intellectual  activity  and  a  healthy 
freedom,  does  not  shift  in  favor  of  doubt,  unless 
in  transient  and  returning  waves.  Judging  by  the 
patristic  apologies,  most  of  the  modern  difficulties, 
in  kind,  w^erc  started  before  the  end  of  the  fifth 
century,  or  even  the  fourth.  The  French  infidel- 
ity of  a  hundred  years  ago ;  the  denials  in  Ger- 
many of  Semler  and  Eichhorn  and  Paulus  and 
Strauss  ;  the  English  free-thinking  of  Bolingbroke 
and  Herbert  and  Collins  and  Hume,  are  all  at 
this  moment,  as  scholars  know,  largely  spent 
forces.     ''  The  incontrovertible  fact  is,"  a  contem- 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         85 

porary  student  has  observed,  ''that  nearly  every 
prominent  German  theological  school  is  now 
under  predominant  evangelical  influence.  Twenty 
years  ago  the  Tubingen  school  in  criticism  was 
formidable.  Its  hopeless  decline  has  been  written 
in  more  than  one  tongue."  ''  Strauss  laughs  at 
Paulus,  Baur  at  Strauss,  Renan  at  Baur,  the  hour 
glass  at  all." 

The  matter  of  unbehef  as  springing  from  dis- 
coveries in  physical  science  lies  apart  from  this 
discussion,  except  as  it  may  favor  a  certain  skep- 
tical tendency  respecting  all  opinions  received 
from  the  past.  I  do  not  enter,  by  a  single  step, 
the  province  of  purely  physical  investigation. 
But  standing  at  the  gate  of  it — the  entry  of  that 
city  of  ma^rial  nature — this  Christian  wisdom 
calls  to  the  men  who  go  in  and  out,  and  tells  them 
these  four  things,  which  some  of  them  would  seem 
willing  to  have  unsaid  and  unremembered,  but 
which  no  one  of  that  searching  company  of  stu- 
dents has  yet  been  able  to  deny.  First,  the  char- 
acter of  Jesus  Christ  is  a  phenomenon  in  the 
realm  of  fact,  which,  just  because  it  stands  outside 
the  province  of  your  physical  inquiry,  cannot  pos- 
sibly be  tested  by  any  of  your  instruments  or 
chemicals,  cannot  be  disproved  by  any  possible 
physical  demonstration,  and  cannot  be  accounted 
for  by  any  theory  so  entirely  scientific  as  that 
which  the  Christian  records  and  Christian  history 
supply.  Secondly,  in  similar  terms,  we  say  of  the 
spiritual  world  and  its  contents  :  Personally,  you 
may  refuse  the  evidence  for  it  to  yourselves  ;  but 
you  never  can  establish  a  negative  ;  it  is  impossi- 


86  LECTURE    THIRD. 

ble  to  test  spiritual  substance  by  material  analysis  ; 
find  what  you  may  to  be  true  of  the  nerve-centres, 
bioplasm,  the  brain,  or  the  geologic  antecedents 
of  our  race,  that  can  never  exclude  from  the  uni- 
verse a  class  of  facts  which,  by  their  very  nature, 
if  they  exist  at  all,  are  as  far  beyond  the  laws  of 
matter  as  its  forms.  Thirdly,  so  far  not  an  ap- 
proach has  been  made  to  the  fixing  of  the  origin 
of  natural  life  elsewhere  than  in  a  personal  God  ; 
and  as  to  motion,  the  only  parent  of  change — and 
nature  is  change — inertia  being  a  law  of  matter, 
matter  could  never  move  or  stir  itself,  but  must 
have  had  a  mover,  or  else  there  is  an  effect  with- 
out a  cause,""  and  therefore  both  the  creation  and 

^  See  a  forcible  demonstration  of  this  point  by  the  Rev.  Prof. 
W.  D.  Wilson,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  etc.,  of  Ithaca.  He  says:  "Spen- 
cer's theory  is  faulty  in  another  respect.  The  state  of  '  complete 
equilibrium  or  rest,'  whether  first,  last,  or  midst,  is  one  from 
which  the  matter  of  a  universe  could  never  emerge  without  some 
'  outside  agency,'  which  is  not  material  at  all.  It  must  have  been 
rather  a  spontaneous  person. 

"  In  '  complete  equilibrium  or  rest,'  no  atoms  or  particles  can  be 
acting  upon  one  another — or  if  several  of  them  are  acting  upon 
each  other,  their  activity  is  so  balanced  that  they  are  at  rest. 
What  shall  start  them  into  action  ?  Shall  some  outside  substance 
bring  them  nearer  together  so  that  they  can  begin  to  cohere  ? 
Shall  something  change  their  temperature  so  that  they  shall  be- 
gin to  unite  chemically,  resulting  in  change  of  gravity  and  so  in 
motion?  But  what  is  this  outside  agency?  Not  matter,  of 
course,  for  all  the  matter  of  the  universe  is  supposed  to  be  in  this 
state  of  complete  equilibrium  or  rest.  Shall  the  atoms  begin  to 
act  of  themselves  ?  Then  they  violate  the  laws  and  conditions 
of  inertia,  spoken  of  above.  Or  if  we  look  in  the  other  direction 
— to  the  second  stage  of  rest,  we  shall  encounter  the  same  diffi- 
culty. When  in  motion  they  may  be  said  to  have  a  certain  mo- 
mentum or  vis  viva^  but  with  a  state  of  rest  this  becomes  noth- 
ing, and  cannot  of  course,  therefore,  start  them  into  motion  or 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT         8/ 

the  re-creation  by  the  Father  of  Man  and  Christ 
are  superior  to  science,  and  the  creatorship  is  in- 
dependent of  nature,  on  which  it  acts.  Fourthly, 
inasmuch  as  there  is  not  one  department  of  sci- 
ence where  inquiry  goes  on  without  the  working 
of  the  human  faculty  which  we  call  faith,^  there- 
activity  again.  And  if  matter  is  eternal,  it  must  have  passed 
through  these  maxima  and  minima  not  once  or  twice  only,  but 
an  infinite  number  of  times.  These  maxima  and  minima  are 
real  '  dead  points'  from  out  of  which  materialism  can  find  no 
means  of  producing  life  or  motion.  But  here  the  materialist 
resorts  to  some  one  or  another  of  his  'forces,'  which  as  we  have 
seen  are  as  'dead'  as  matter  itself  at  these  '  points.' 

"  Hence  if  matter  or 'the  universe'  is  '  self-existent '  or  eter- 
nal, it  must  be  forever  and  always  in  one  and  the  same  condition, 
with  no  development  or  evolution,  unless  there  is  some  '  Exter- 
nal Agency '  who  may  as  well  have  been  its  Creator — to  set  in 
motion  and  keep  it  moving  in  the  process  of  evolution.  And 
that  is  about  all  that  mere  science  can  know  of  creation." 

^''  Since  these  lectures  were  delivered  there  has  appeared  in 
print  an  address  presented  at  a  recent  meeting  of  the  German 
Association  of  Physicians  and  Naturalists  at  Munich,  by  Prof. 
Rudolf  Virchow,  of  Berlin,  a  name  of  the  very  highest  scientific 
authority  in  Europe,  equally  eminent  in  anthropology  and  chem- 
istry, containing  the  following  passage  among  others,  clearly  de- 
signed to  check  and  qualify  the  tendency  to  rash  conclusions 
among  his  unreligious  associates  :  "In  reality,  even  in  science, 
there  is  a  certain  domain  of  faith,  wherein  the  individual  no 
longer  undertakes  to  prove  what  is  handed  down  to  him  as  true, 
but  accepts  it  as  simple  tradition  ;  and  this  is  precisely  the  same 
thing  which  we  see  in  the  church.  Conversely,  I  may  observe — 
and  my  view  is  one  that  is  not  rejected  by  the  church  itself — that 
it  is  not  belief  alone  which  is  taught  in  the  church,  but  that  even 
church  doctrines  have  their  objective  and  their  subjective  sides." 
In  the  same  paper  occur  these  ominously  judicial  sentences,  in- 
tended for  the  benefit  of  the  school  of  Darwin  and  Prof.  Vogt  : 
"  Only  ten  years  ago,  when  a  skull  was  found,  perhaps  in  peat 
or  in  lake  dwellings,  or  in  some  old  cave,  men  always  fancied 
that  they  detected  in  it  evidences  of  a  savage  and  quite  undevel- 


88  LECTURE    THIRD. 

fore  the  same  faculty  cannot  be  discredited  in  re- 
lation to  the  unseen  and  the  unknown,  presented 
to  it  in  the  revelation  and  person  of  Christ. 

Already  it  is  beginning  to  be  allowed  by  candid 
minds  on  both  sides  of  the  dispute,  that  the  pros- 
pect of  a  final  antagonism  between  the  two  classes 
of  facts,  or  between  revelation  and  nature,  is  di- 
minishing. Christian  theologians  admit  evolution. 
Evolutionists  admit  an  intelligent  or  thinking  ori- 
gin of  hfe.     As  to  the  Bible,  it  is  generally  agreed 

oped  state  ;  in  short,  they  were  ready  to  find  the  monkey  type. 
There  is  now  much  less  of  this  sort  of  thing.  The  old  troglo- 
dytes, lake  inhabitants,  and  peat  people  turn  out  to  have  been 
quite  a  respectable  society.  They  have  heads  of  such  a  size  that 
many  a  person  now  living  would  feel  happy  to  possess  one  like 
them.  I  must  say  that  our  fossil  monkey-skull  or  man-ape 
skull,  which  really  belonged  to  a  human  proprietor,  has  never 
been  found.  As  a  fact,  we  must  positively  acknowledge  that 
there  is  always  a  sharp  limit  between  man  and  the  ape.  We  can- 
not teach,  Tve  cannot  designate  as  a  revelaiioji  of  science,  the  doctrine 
that  man  descends  fro7ti  the  ape,  or  from  any  otlier  atiimaiy 

Quite  as  striking,  perhaps,  though  of  less  scientific  gravity,  is  a 
concession  publicly  made  a  short  time  ago  to  a  prominent  Ameri- 
can Association  of  Free  Religionists,  disciples  of  Mr.  Theodore 
Parker,  by  a  well-known  speaker  of  such  radical  opinions  as  Mr. 
Wendell  Phillips,  a  defiant  doctrinaire:  "  I  am  proud  to  be  your 
lecturer,  but  your  doctrine  will  not  work.  Tested  by  history, 
tested  by  philosophy,  tested  by  human  nature,  you  will  find  it 
will  not  work." 

Every  fair-minded  Protestant  must  accept  with  sincere  satis- 
faction the  strong  declarations  of  the  agreement  of  Religion  and 
true  Science,  put  forth  in  the  late  Pastoral  of  the  present  Pope 
while  he  was  Archbishop  of  Perugia,  so  entirely  in  contrast  with 
the  doctrines  of  the  S3'llabus  of  his  predecessor.  Great  names  in 
knowledge,  the  common  possession  of  the  modern  world,  are 
there  set  forward  as  those  of  deeply  religious  men  who  "  rejoiced 
to  adore  the  Creator  in  his  works;"  and  the  triumphs  of  the 
study  of  nature  are  held  up  as  contributions  to  the  glory  of  God- 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.         89 

that  science  has  no  right  to  quarrel  with  it,  be- 
cause it  Jias  no  scientific  purpose  or  pretension. 
It  is  only  trivial  and  superficial  contestants 
that  can  enlarge  any  more  on  the  battles  of 
Faith  with  science,  because  the  old  war  was  not 
waged  by  Faith  herself,  but  by  men  who  dreaded 
innovation,  not  more  for  religion  than  for  every 
other  conservative  instinct  and  interest,  and  as 
often  by  metaphysicians  and  politicians  as  by  the- 
ologians. Finally,  against  the  disbelief  of  the 
scientists,  set  the  immense  activity  of  modern 
Christendom,  not  matched  through  all  the  eight- 
een centuries  before,  in  literature,  in  education, 
in  social  charities,  in  missions.  Since  the  outgoing 
of  primitive  powers  in  the  apostolic  and  sub-apos- 
tolic age,  there  has  been  no  such  wave  of  gospel 
light,  no  such  magnificent  sweep  of  unselfish  obe- 
dience to  Christ's  commission,  on  the  two  hemi- 
spheres, as  in  the  last  two  generations.  Set  that 
movement  over  against  the  entire  rationalistic 
demonstration,  and  compare  the  two  by  any  test 
of  vitality  that  your  physics  or  metaphysics  will 
furnish. "''" 


*  In  the  United  States,  since  the  beginning  of  the  Revolution- 
ary War,  the  increase  of  population  has  been  a  little  over  eleven- 
fold. The  increase  of  churches  has  been  thirt)''-sevenfold.  The 
members  of  these  churches  were  then  as  one  to  seventeen  hun- 
dred of  the  people.  Now  they  are  as  one  to  six  hundred.  It 
seems  that  six  houses  of  Christian  worship  are  finished  some- 
where in  these  States  each  working  day  of  the  year,  and  that  fifty 
millions  of  dollars  are  spent  yearly  on  objects  connected  with 
them.  There  are  thirty-two  millions  of  Bibles  printed  annually, 
and  they  are  all  distributed.  There  are  three  hundred  and  ninety- 
eight  colleges,  and  more  than  eight  hundred  seats  of  a  high  secu- 


90  LECTURE    THIRD. 

IV.  We  can  take  society  intellectually  at  its 
worst  or  at  its  best.  If  we  ask  how  Christianity 
has  fared  with  men  in  the  inferior  classes,  the  an- 
swer is  positive.  Not  in  Galilee  or  by  the  Jor- 
dan only,  but  everywhere  Christ's  first  welcome 
has  been  with  the  common  people,  because  in 
them  wJiat  is  common  to  man  is  least  encumbered 
and  acts  with  most  spontaneous  liberty.  Pass, 
then,  to  the  mountain  ranges  of  humanity.  Start- 
ing at  the  Ascension,  the  peaks  that  are  high 
enough  in  antiquity  to  be  seen  across  the  ages 
still  have  on  their  foreheads  the  cross.  You  can 
count  the  exceptions  on  the  fingers  of  one  hand. 
Give  time  for  thought  and  doubt  to  do  their  best. 
Give  a  thousand  years  ;  that  is  certainly  liberal. 
Part,  then,  your  lines  of  mental  grandeur,  and  let 
them  run  as  they  will.  What  names  of  creative 
genius  will  you  place  near  the  four  that  stand  in 
supreme  splendor  ?  Dante's  face,  sculptured  in 
classic  majesty,  is  illuminated  by  the  Christian 
sun,  and  his  august  epics  are  of  worlds  that  only 
faith  can  see.  This  world  is  less  real  to  many  liv- 
ing in  it  than  heaven  was  to  Milton,  or  than  Mil- 
ton made  it  to  England.  Michael  Angelo,  whose 
genius  found  itself  in  possession  of  all  arts  rather 
than  mastered  them,  who  said,  ''  I  will  hang  the 
Pantheon  between  earth  and  heaven,"  and  more 
than  fulfilled  his  promise,  wrote  in  his  old  age  to 
Vasari : 

lar  education,  nearly  all  of  them  founded  by  believing  men. 
That  does  hot  look  as  if  Christians  were  much  afraid  of  science, 
or  as  if  knowledge  were  the  friend  of  skepticism  and  the  foe  of 
-faith. 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT.        9 1 

"  Well-nigh  the  voyage  now  is  overpast, 

And  my  frail  bark,  through  troubled  seas  and  rude, 

Draws  near  that  common  haven  where,  at  last, 
Of  every  action,  be  it  evil  or  good. 

Must  due  account  be  rendered.     Well  I  know 
How  vain  will  then  appear  the  favored  art, 
Sole  idol  long  and  monarch  of  my  heart ; 

For  all  is  vain  that  man  desires  below. 

And  now  remorseful  thoughts  my  soul  alarm, 

That  which  must  come,  and  that  beyond  the  grave  ; 
Picture  and  sculpture  lose  their  feeble  charm. 

And  to  that  Help  Divine  I  turn  for  aid 

Who  from  the  Cross  extends  his  arms  to  save," 

Shakespeare  knew  the  Bible  better  than  he  knew 
courts,  or  Athens,  or  anatomy  ;  and  in  his  last  tes- 
tament, I  reminded  you,  he  bequeathed  his  soul 
for  pardon  to  the  Redeemer.  Where  was  the 
early  eloquence  of  modern  France  if  not  in 
her  pulpits  ?  Where  is  the  debt  of  all  late  phi- 
losophy if  not  to  Continental  and  Scotch  and 
English  Christians  ?  The  foremost  philosophical 
historian  of  Germany,  after  disbelieving,  commits 
his  son  to  be  trained  in  the  Christian  creed. 
There  is  a  modern  German,  who,  as  well  as  any, 
unites  the  finest  culture  to  original  insight — Jean 
Paul  Richter.  He  deliberately  writes :  ''  He  who 
was  the  holiest  among  the  mighty,  and  the  might- 
iest among  the  holy,  has,  with  his  pierced  hand, 
lifted  heathenism  off  its  hinges,  and  turned  the 
dolorous  and  accursed  centuries  into  new  chan- 
nels, and  now  governs  the  ages."  There  is  an 
American,  who,  as  well  as  any,  unites  the  keenest 
logical  subtilty  with  the  grandest  power  of  gen- 
eralization in  jurisprudence  and  in  statesmanship. 
He  said,  in  a  most  lucid  hour,  ''  The  Gospel  of 


92  LECTURE    THIRD. 


Jesus  Christ  must  be  a  divine  reality.  This  belief 
enters  into  the  very  depth  of  my  conscience." 
And  on  his  sepulchre  by  the  sea,  made  ready  in 
his  lifetime,  he  caused  these  words  to  be  cut : 
''Lord,  I  believe;  help  thou  mine  unbelief" — a 
creed,  and  a  prayer.  There  is  a  man  who,  be- 
sides having  the  brain  of  a  mathematician  and 
the  courage  of  a  soldier,  and  a  most  penetrating 
insight  into  other  men,  has  proved  a  greater  con- 
queror than  Alexander  or  Csesar.  He  is  at  St. 
Helena.  Three  biographers  and  all  scholars 
agree  that  he  said  this :  ''  Can  you  tell  me  who 
Jesus  Christ  was  ?  I  think  I  understand  some- 
thing of  human  nature  ;  and  I  am  a  man.  Jesus 
Christ  was  more  than  a  man.  Across  a  chasm  of 
eighteen  hundred  years  Jesus  Christ  makes  a  de- 
mand which  is  of  all  others  difficult  to  satisfy. 
He  asks  for  the  human  heart ;  he  will  have  it  en- 
tirely to  himself.  He  demands  it  unconditionally, 
and  forthwith  his  demand  is  granted.  Millions 
of  men  to-day  would  die  for  him.  This  proves  to 
me  convincingly  the  divinity  of  Jesus  Christ." 

Do  we  need  to  look  any  farther  along  the 
heights  of  history  for  signs  that  the  Religion  of 
the  Son  of  Man  is  suited  to  mankind  ? 

The  longer  you  look  the  more  every  mist  of 
doubt  melts  away  ;  the  more  sharply  and  firmly 
the  outline  of  the  great  historic  realities  which 
gave  Christianity  its  life  stands  out. 

Most  effectual  of  all  helps  to  this  blessing  of 
trust  is  the  cultivation  of  a  personal  intercourse 
with  him,  whose  personal  power  and  grace 
are  the  glory   of  all   time.      It  is,  I  believe,   the 


CHRIST  IN  THE  PRESENCE  OF  DOUBT. 


93 


experience  of  most  men  who  have  dealt  with 
the  difficulties  of  doubters,  that  the  greater 
number  of  those  minds  that  are  brought  home 
to  faith  are  drawn  by  some  new  feeling  of  what 
Christ  is,  and  what  his  love  is  Avorth,  rather 
than  by  any  argument.  The  hours  come — they 
are  sure  to  come — they  come  to  the  strongest 
heads  and  the  gayest  spirits,  when,  by  some  hard 
blow  or  secret  voice,  by  the  sorrow  of  bereave- 
ment and  broken-hearted ness,  or  the  more  myste- 
rious and  sometimes  heavier  sorrow  of  mere 
satiety  of  self  and  weariness  of  the  world,  we 
know,  at  last,  that  there  is  no  other  place  for  the 
sick  head  and  the  faint  heart  and  the  sinful  con- 
science but  a  place  close  to  the  Son  of  God. 
Some  one  from  the  house  may  be  gone  out  for- 
ever. A  hollow  heart  that  we  trusted  may  be 
uncovered.  The  mere  dull  wearing  out  of  dis- 
appointed hopes  may  turn  the  eyes  to  the  hills 
from  W'hence  cometh  our  help.  We  lie  awake 
alone,  conscious  of  eternity,  and  hear  "  time 
flowing  through  the  middle  of  the  night."  Some 
strange  pain  in  your  body  prophesies  the  end 
and  the  Judgment.  The  past  is  dead  ;  the  future 
is  dark.  You  know  your  sin.  Men  and  women, 
at  their  best,  cannot  forgive  this  sin  ;  cannot  satis- 
fy this  thirst  for  a  true  life — this  hunger  after  God. 
Then  there  will  come  to  you  a  new  reason  for 
faith,  better  than  all  the  evidences  of  learning 
or  logic  together.  You  need  your  Saviour  Christ, 
and  looking  unto  him  you  know,  believing,  that 
you  are  saved. 


LECTURE   IV. 


^Txje  ^tXxQxon  of  Ctoist  in  tixe  poxotx 
of  nction :  its  ^^jri^jeal  t0  ttoc 


♦*£    am  vfatjn   to  jjvcarf)   tijc   dJospcl  to  I'ou   ttjat  are   at 

3^0inC    also." — Rom.  I  :  15. 

•*  S:i)e  minjjliom  of  dSotj  is  not   in  lDor:i  but  in  potoer/*— 

I  Cor.  4  :  20, 


i 


In  the  great  historic  transition  from  Greek  to 
Roman  society  we  encounter  a  fresh  demonstra- 
tion that  Christ  embodies  the  essentials  of  human- 
ity, and  that  his  reUgion  is  not  Umited  by  national 
lines.  Between  the  two  societies  themselves  the 
contrast  is  immense.  Whatever  Greece  had  done 
at  the  Christian  era  to  colonize  its  language,  its 
arts,  or  its  vices  in  Italy,  Rome  was  Rome  imperial 
still.  A  skeptic  of  the  reign  of  Nero  might  have 
said,  Granted  that  your  Galilean  has  prospered 
east  of  the  Adriatic  by  some  oriental  tinge  in  his 
blood,  these  western  lands  and  armies,  Avith  robust 
practical  energies,  will  own  no  such  crucified 
Master !  Yet  silently,  but  swiftly,  as  we  shall 
see,  the  faith  of  the  crucified  Master  entered 
in,  without  sword  or  policy,  and,  by  such  arms 
as  never  tried  the  gates  before  or  since,  con- 
quered Rome.  The  Gospel  suits  every  social 
type  it  encounters,  because  it  is  **  not  in  word 
but  in  power."  It  is  no  more  Semitic  than  Aryan, 
no  more  Syrian  than  Tuscan,  no  more  Arabian 
than  Gothic.  You  find  a  Christian  on  the  Tiber, 
among  Norsemen,  in  Ceylon,  in  Carthage,  and  you 


g8  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

know  him  by  his  Master.  The  man  is  no  more  and 
no  less  a  Christian,  however  temperament,  may 
modify  his  religious  emotions,  for  a  torrid  or  a 
frozen  climate,  for  sand  or  forest,  for  his  color, 
for  his  tongue.  One  ethnic  family  takes  on  the 
stamp  almost  as  freely  as  another,  and  the  Christ 
formed  within  is  independent  of  all  the  tribal 
moulds  or  traditions.  It  is  so  on  every  continent 
to-day.  From  the  river  of  Christ's  baptism  to  the 
ends  of  the  earth  3^ou  know  the  Christian  as  a 
Christian.  What  does  it  mean,  but  that  Christ 
has  and  is,  in  himself,  what  is  characteristic  of 
man,  and  can  be  separated  by  no  bounds  from  any 
race?  The  government  may  be  imperial,  patri^ 
archal,  feudal,  military,  democratic  ;  that  avails 
nothing  to  unfit  its  subjects  for  the  universal  citi- 
zenship. Each  polity  is  left  free  to  develop  it- 
self by  other  laws,  except  as  they  are  all  modified 
in  their  moral  complexion,  and  tempered  in  their 
spirit,  by  the  celestial  law  of  charity.  Christ  is 
larger  and  deeper  than  any  or  all  of  them.  So  of 
the  several  arts  of  beauty.  We  recognize  styles 
of  painting,  music,  sculpture,  architecture,  and 
schools  of  letters.  Christianit}^  does  not  interfere 
with  them,  and  is  not  excluded  by  them.  It  deals 
with  character.  It  is  behind  the  colors,  the  mar- 
ble, the  sounds,  the  shapes,  a  more  sublime  essence, 
gradually  purifying  and  elevating  their  genius, 
but  too  catholic  to  be  provincialized,  or  national- 
ized, or  suborned  to  any  aesthetic  domination.  It 
is  human,  and  includes  all  that  is  human,  because 
it  is  also  divine.  This  would  all  be  otherwise  if 
this  religion,  instead  of  being   dynamical,  were 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  99 

merely  literary  or  artistic ;  if  it  were  in  word  and 
not  in  power,  an  opinion  or  a  ritual  only  and  not 
a  spirit  and  a  life.'-' 

Moving  westward  from  Judea  with  Stf.  Paul, 
the  Gospel  entered  Europe  through  two  great 
national  doorways,  the  Athenian  and  the  Roman 
mind.  In  each  of  these  two  intellectual  moulds 
the  original  truth  of  Christ,  still  undivided  and 
identical,  took  a  distinct  working  form ;  and  it 
was  a  distinction  which  has  been  preserved  ever 
since,  in  the  differing  characteristics  of  the  eastern 
and  western  branches  of  the  church.  By  this 
'''■  diversity  of  operation"  it  seems  to  have  been 
the  plan  of  God  that  the  common  faith,  springing 
from  Jerusalem  at  the  Christian  Pentecost,  as  the 

*  It  can  scarcely  be  necessary  to  show  here  in  particulars  that 
both  directly  and  indirectly,  by  precept  and  example,  Christianity 
harmonizes  with  all  the  better  natural  impulses,  like  courtesy, 
hospitality,  the  joyous  use  of  the  faculties  in  common  lines  of 
action,  ceremonial  homage,  affections  of  kindred,  marital  devo- 
tion, special  friendship,  patriotism.  In  regard  to  some  of  these, 
it  indisputably  provides  such  beneficent  regulation  as  insures 
the  largest  and  most  lasting  welfare  of  the  natural  capacity  or 
organ  of  enjoyment.  That  all  efforts  of  its  enem.ies  to  convict 
the  Gospel  of  asceticism  have  failed,  no  more  needs  to  be  now 
asserted  than  that  time  has  turned  the  impious  wit  of  Voltaire 
and  the  French  court  of  the  last  century  into  a  ghastly  absurd- 
ity. Rousseau's  ingenious  idea  that  Christian  faith  extinguishes 
the  love  of  country  and  annihilates  political  responsibility,  by 
transferring  man's  interest  from  this  world  to  another,  has  been 
refuted  over  and  over  again,  while  it  never  needed  to  be  re- 
futed at  all.  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's  recent  papers  on  "Cere- 
monial Government,"  whatver  else  they  prove  or  are  intended 
to  prove,  establish  an  ample  foundation  in  human  nature  for  as 
much  of  the  ritual  element  as  was  ever  contended  for  in  the 
Primitive  or  Protestant  Church. 


loo  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

law  had  reached  out  from  the  same  centre  before, 
should  control  the  governing  nations  of  the  earth. 
Of  the  Latin  race  the  predominant  attribute  was 
the  will.  The  two  capacious  hands  with  which 
Rome  seized  the  world  were  colonies  and  armies. 
And  as  the  will  is  the  executive  faculty  in  man, 
so  the  Latin  or  Western  Christianity  became  re- 
markable for  its  practical  drill,  moving  every- 
where with  the  precision  of  a  military  array — ■ 
orderly,  obedient — its  aggressions  kept  well  in 
hand,  but  ever  pushing  its  way  to  occupy  and  sub- 
sidize, if  it  could,  in  an  outward  rule,  the  coun- 
tries of  the  globe.^     Accordingly,  the  most  con- 

*  The  contrast  is  carried  into  other  but  kindred  regions  in  a 
passage  in  Freeman's   "Principles  of  Divine   Service,"  vol.  i., 

P-  273- 

"The  east  is  more  uniform  and  unchanging  ;  the  west  more 
multiform  and  variable.  While  the  west  brings  countless 
changes,  according  to  the  season,  on  the  same  essential  idea,  the 
east  prolongs  it  in  one  unvaried  and  majestic  roll  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end  of  the  year.  The  east,  again,  is  more  soft, 
the  west  more  intellectual.  The  east  loves  rather  to  meditate 
on  God  as  he  is,  and  on  the  facts  of  Christian  doctrine  as  they 
stand  in  the  creed  ;  the  west  contemplates  more  practically  the 
relations  of  man  to  God.  The  east  has  had  its  Athanasius  and 
its  Andrew  of  Crete  ;  the  west  its  Augustine  and  Leo.  Hence 
psalms  and  hymns  in  more  profuse  abundance  characterize  the 
eastern  ;  larger  use  and  more  elaborate  adaptations  of  scripture 
the  western  offices.  The  east,  by  making  the  Psalms  all  less 
meditative,  seems  to  declare  her  mind  that  praise  is  the  only 
way  to  knowledge  ;  the  west,  by  her  continued  Psalm  and  lec- 
tion system,  that  knowledge  is  the  proper  fuel  of  praise.  While 
the  east,  again,  soars  to  God  in  exclamations  of  angelic  self-forget- 
fulness,  the  west  comprehends  all  the  spiritual  needs  of  man 
in  collects  of  matchless  profundity  ;  reminding  us  of  the  alleged 
distinction  between  the  seraphim,  who  love  most,  and  the  cheru- 
bim, who  know  most.     Thus  the  east  praises,  the  west  pleads. 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  lOI 

spicuous  aspect  that  the  new  rehgion  put  on 
among  the  churches  of  the  west  was  that  of  an  in- 
stitution for  the  regulation  of  human  hfe  and  the 
shaping  of  society.  Of  the  Greek  people,  the 
prominent  traits  were  mental  liberty  and  versa- 
tility. Art,  poetry,  eloquence  being  the  instinc- 
tive manifestations  of  their  genius,  every  thing 
ran  to  expression.  Even  their  cities  were  not  so 
much  strongholds  of  dominion  as  "  theatres  of 
scenic  pomp  and  beauty,"  their  navigation  not 
merely  '^  expeditions  of  war"  but  ''  ventures  of 
curiosity"  or  a  commerce  whose  gains  made  the 
seaports  gesthetically  brilliant  and  gay.  In  their 
very  games  or  trials  of  phj^sical  strength  the  lite- 
rary feature  was  about  as  salient  as  the  muscular, 
and  Olympia  was  almost  as  much  the  ''  garden  of 
great  intellects"  as  the  arena  of  bodily  gymnastics. 
Hence  when  the  missionary  apostle,  planting  the 
cross  along  the  shores,  crossed  over  from  Asia 
Minor  to  Athens  or  Philippi,  he  struck  upon  com- 
munities whose  culture  and  originality  chose  the 
channel  of  speech  rather  than  of  organized  action 
— a  people  gifted,  famous,  and  sometimes  victori- 
ous, with  their  tongues.  They  came  to  one 
another  in  the  wisdom  ot  "  words." 

But  the  Avord  or  name  is  never  the  thing  itself; 
the  sign  is  not  the  matter  signified  ;  the  carrier  is 

The  one  has  fixed  her  eye  more  intently  on  the  glorious  throne 
of  Christ,  the  other  on  his  cross.  Finally,  the  east  has  been 
more  inquisitive  and  inventive  in  the  departments  both  of 
knowledge  and  praise  ;  the  west,  more  constructive,  has  >vrought 
up,  out  of  scattered  eastern  materials,  her  exhaustive  Athanasian 
Creed  and  her  matchless  Te  Deum." 


I02  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

not  the  freight  conveyed.  It  is  only  when  the  mind 
of  a  people  has  become  thin  and  light,  its  habit 
artificial,  its  education  ''weak  and  literary," 
that  the  two  are  confounded,  and  you  have  a  Delia 
Cruscan  period  in  letters,  declamation  at  the 
forum,  or  cant  in  religion. 

I  have  submitted  hitherto  that  Christianity  is 
suited  to  man  everywhere,  because  man  is  a  crea- 
ture of  affections,  and  yet  finds  no  perfect  love 
answering  his  own,  except  in  the  person  of  Christ ; 
because  he  is  also  a  creature  of  worship,  and  finds 
no  worship  that  raises,  or  purifies,  or  comforts 
him  except  in  Him  whom  St.  Paul  at  Athens 
"  declared "  to  the  Athenians ;  because  he  is 
a  creature  of  thought,  or  intellectual  curiosity 
and  invention,  and  finds  at  last  no  rational  expla- 
nation of  the  past  history  of  his  race,  and  no  key 
to  the  problems  of  his  destin}^  except  in  that 
Lord  of  the  intellect  who  needed  not  that  any 
should  testify  of  men,  because  he  knew  what  is  in 
them.  I  submit  now  that  Christianity  is  suited 
to  man  because  man  is  a  creature  of  will,  i.e.,  of 
action,  and  yet  finds  no  perfect  law  to  act  by 
except  in  the  will  of  God  meeting  and  ordering 
his  own,  a  law  proceeding  from  the  king  of  that 
kingdom  which  is  not  of  this  world. 

Without  this  king  the  world  had  its  best  legal 
training  in  the  Roman  jurisprudence.  It  grevv^ 
up  finally  to  the  Pandects  of  Justinian,  from  the 
rudimentary  twelve  tables,  dating  back  nearly 
five  hundred  years  before  the  Christian  era ;  yet 
Justinian  himself  was  a  tyrant,  an  extortioner  and 
a  libertine,  and  his  wife  a  harlot.    The  system  has 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  IO3 

had  its  effect,  both  as  precedent  and  pattern,  on 
all  the  subsequent  leg-islation  and  judiciaries  ;  on 
the  laws  of  the  Ostrogoths  and  Lombardy,  the 
Bulgarians,  the  Franks  of  Gaul,  the  law  schools  of 
Italy  in  the  middle  ages,  the  minds  of  the  Magna 
Charta  barons  of  England,  and  the  courts  of  near- 
ly every  modern  European  state.  The  Praetorian 
Edicts  had  expanded  it.  The  law  of  nature,///^ 
natiiralc,  had  deepened  and  exalted  it.  Cicero, 
in  his  treatise  De  Legibus,  rises  to  a  certain  lofty 
conception  of  a  universal  republic  under  a  single 
rule  or  code.  '*  This  universe,"  he  says,  ^'  forms 
one  immeasurable  commonwealth  and  city.  And 
as  in  earthly  states  certain  particular  laws  gov- 
ern the  particular  relationships  of  kindred  tribes, 
so  in  the  nature  of  things  does  a  universal  law, 
far  more  magnificent  and  resplendent,  regulate  the 
affairs  of  that  universal  city  where  gods  and  men 
compose  one  vast- association."  (L.  i.,  7.)  Mani- 
festly not  only  in  the  better  intelligence  of  juris- 
consults and  emperors,  but  in  the  people,  there 
was  a  reaching  after  equity  and  a  groping  aspira- 
tion for  justice  between  nations,  as  between  man 
and  man. 

Place  with  this  grand  action  of  the  will  by  law, 
in  the  western  empire,  its  superb  system  of  inter- 
communication." Out  from  the  imperial  city  ran 
five  vast  and  costly  national  roads,  with  solid 
basaltic  pavements,  branching  to  all  the  quarters 
of  the  globe,  ramif)ang  into  a  network  of  graded 

"  Both  these  topics  are  more  fully  treated  by  Prof.  Fisher,  in 
his  "  Beginnings  of  Christianity,"  with  references  to  various 
authorities. 


I04 


LECTURE  FOURTH. 


and  secure  highways  that  stretched  wherever  an 
army  would  march  or  a  caravan  creep. '  They 
were  in  ''  straight  lines,  crossing  mountains  and 
bridging  rivers,  binding  together  the  most  dis- 
tant cities,  and  connecting  them  all  with  the  capi- 
tal." ''  A  journey  might  have  been  made  on  Ro- 
man highways,  with  only  brief  trips  by  sea,  from 
Alexandria  to  Carthage,  thence  through  Spain 
and  France  northward  to  the  Scottish  border, 
back  through  Leyden  and  Milan,  eastward  by  land 
to  Constantinople  and  Antioch,  and  thence  home 
to  Alexandria,"  a  total  distance  of  seven  thousand 
miles.  Along  all  these  paths  the  traveller  could 
measure  his  distances  by  milestones.  ''  Maps  of 
the  route,  with  information  of  stopping-places  for 
the  night,  facilitated  the  travel."  Augustus  estab- 
lished a  system  of  postal  conveyances,  used  by  offi- 
cers, couriers,  and  other  agents  of  the  government. 
Thus  the  intermixture  of  peoples  was  far  beyond 
the  common  modern  notion  of  it.  "  Greek  schol- 
ars," says  a  German  student,  'Mvcpt  school  in 
Spain  ;  the  women  of  a  Roman  colony  in  Switzer- 
land employed  a  goldsmith  from  Asia  Minor ;  in 
the  cities  of  Gaul  were  Eastern  painters  and 
sculptors  ;  Galileans  and  Germans  served  as  body- 
guards of  a  Jewish  king  at  Jerusalem.  Jews 
were  settled  in  all  the  provinces."  Bands  of  mer- 
chants poured  along  all  these  avenues,  plying  an 
inland  traffic.  Commerce  comes  with  peace,  and 
the  empire  was  peace.  It  was  a  peace  won  first 
by  the  sword  and  preserved  by  law.  Along 
those  roads  moved  the  police  of  invincible  armies, 
and  the  praetorian    eagles.     It  was   one   mighty 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  105 

reign  of  law.  Into  such  a  world  Christ  was  born 
at  Bethlehem,  a  Prince  and  a  Saviour. 

But  if  we  ascend  into  the  region  of  morals,  what 
has  law  done  there?  With  the  Stoic,  everybody 
knows,  self-murder  is  no  crime.  Zeno,  and  that 
very  Cleanthes  whom  St.  Paul  quotes  at  Athens, 
took  their  own  life,  as  did  Cato.  No  room  is 
made  among  the  sterner  virtues  for  charity, 
which  with  Jesus  is  the  fulfilling  of  all  law,  the 
root  of  morality,  and  the  crown  of  character. 
Lucretius,  the  poetical  interpreter  of  Epicurus — 
brought  back  lately  by  one  of  our  ambitious  natur- 
alists to  instruct  nineteenth-century  Christians, 
leaving  us  to  marvel 

"That  star-eyed  science  should  have  wandered  there, 
To  waft  us  back  this  message  of  despair" — 

bids  his  countrymen  forget  to  ask  when  a  man 
dies  whether  he  shall  live  again.  And  yet  in  all 
these  breasts,  if  we  study  them  deeply,  there  is  a 
yearning  for  a  lawgiver  like  the  Son  of  Man.  In 
their  voices  there  is  an  undertone  of  sadness,  a 
wail  of  despair,  a  cry  for  Christ.  I  believe  that  if 
Aurelius  and  Plutarch  and  Cato  had  seen  him, 
they  would  have  followed  him.  They  dreamed 
of  another  republic,  under  a  new  and  diviner  com- 
mandment. Rome,  such  as  she  was,  was  an  image 
of  the  common  country  of  the  human  race.  Plu- 
tarch says  man  may  find  his  country  everywhere. 
Christ  says  every  man  is  my  neighbor,  my 
brother. 

Justice  is  not  a  thing  worked  out  on  the  surface 
of  the  lands,  written  in  codes,  or  comprehended 
in  a  standing  army  of  340,000  men.   Was  humanity 


I06  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

safe?  Did  man  rest  satisfied  and-  upright  and 
pure,  under  the  shadow  of  the  throne  or  the  shield 
of  the  magistrate  ?  Look  again.  Family  life,  so- 
cial life,  the  moral  life  of  the  individual,  were 
rotten  with  vice  and  black  with  crime.  The  sen- 
suality of  all  the  dissolute  blood  under  the  sun 
trickled  into  the  population  of  the  Seven  Hills, 
reckoned  at  a  million.  The  iniquities  are  too  ter- 
rible to  be  named,  unless  we  quote  the  hints  of 
St.  Paul's  first  chapter  to  Roman  Christians. 
Two  hundred  years  before  Christ  religious  cere- 
monies and  orgies,  imported  to  Italy,  had  so 
much  murder  and  debauchery  in  them  that  even 
the  consuls  were  obliged  to  interfere,  three  thou- 
sand fanatical  poisoners  being  executed  in  a  year. 
So  much  for  Roman  law  as  the  regulator  of  Ro- 
man life. 

Cicero  divorced  two  wives,  and  marital  infi- 
delity was  only  screened  by  marriage.  Seneca 
mentions  women,  and  calls  them  illustrious,  Avho 
reckon  time  not  by  the  common  calendar,  but  by 
the  number  of  their  living  husbands  in  succession. 
To  kill  infants,  if  they  are  troublesome,  was  law- 
ful. Roman  women  hired  slave-whippers  by  the 
year  to  scourge  their  servants.  The  spectacles 
and  games  were  public  schools  of  indecency.  The 
pantomime  was  obscene.  In  the  arena,  in  Trajan's 
time,  eleven  thousand  wild  animals  were  slain  in 
four  months.  Children  of  luxury,  boys  and  girls, 
laughed  at  the  torture  of  human  captives,  writh- 
ing in  the  agonies  of  death  on  the  sand,  torn  by 
the  teeth  of  lions. 

You  take  your  place  on  one  of  those  Roman 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS. 


107 


roads,  it  may  be  almost  anywhere,  in  the  days  of 
Trajan  or  the  Antonines — from  the  opening  of  the 
second  century  till  near  its  close.  St.  John,  the 
last  of  the  band  of  twelve  who  stood  around  the 
Original  Person  to  receive  his  mind  and  execute 
his  orders  and  plant  his  church,  will  have  gone  to 
his  rest,  his  visions  closed.  We  will  imagine  that 
any  written  trace  of  any  Christian  record  before 
that,  any  book,  biography  of  Christ,  memoir  of  an 
apostle,  or  fragment  of  any  Father's  apology  is  no- 
Avhere  to  be  found  ;  they  may  either  have  never 
existed  or  been  burnt  up  around  the  stakes  of 
some  of  the  earlier  martyr-fires,  or  buried  in 
caves.  We  shall  be  able  to  find  out  from  other 
sources  in  what  cities  and  countries  the  Gospel 
has  secured  a  foothold.  They  extend  all  the  way, 
at  intervals  at  least,  from  the  East  Indies,  over  a 
broad  belt  branching  both  sides  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean to  the  Pillars  of  Hercules,  and  round  to 
Great  Britain.  Christians  are  beyond  the  Euphra- 
tes— in  Parthia,  in  Arabia.  They  are  strong  in 
northern  Africa.  The  energy  and  valor  of  the  en- 
terprising Scandinavians,  Saxons,  and  brave  Celts 
have  acknowledged  Christ  as  the  mightier  Master, 
his  love  as  the  highest  law,  and  his  cross  as  the 
supreme  throne,  in  the  forests  of  Europe,  from  the 
mouth  of  the  Danube  to  the  Orkneys.  Even 
Gibbon  estimates  that  of  the  entire  population  of 
the  Roman  empire  at  the  Edict  of  Milan  by 
Constantine,  in  A.D.  313,  Avhen  toleration  closed 
the  ten  persecutions,  about  a  twentieth  part  was 
Christian.  The  proportion  may  have  been  less,  but 
at  the  period  we  are  supposing,  say  the  middle  of 


I08  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

the  second  century,  if,  as  Gibbon  reckons,  there 
were  one  hundred  and  twenty  millions  of  people, 
the  Christians  may  have  been  four,  or  perhaps  six 
millions.  TertuUian,  of  Carthage,  who  before  his 
conversion  was  a  lawyer,  the  son  of  a  Roman 
centurion,  and  who  was  in  his  prime  in  A.D.  200, 
wrote  defiantly  and  without  fear  of  contradiction 
to  the  imperial  authorities,  *'  We  outnumber  your 
armies :  there  are  more  Christians  in  a  single 
province  than  in  your  legions.  We  are  but  of 
yesterday,  and  we  have  entered  every  thing  that 
is  yours — cities,  castles,  council-halls,  free  towns, 
the  very  camps  ;  we  have  even  the  senate  and  the 
forum." 

Christianity  went  everywhere,  because  it  was 
alive  ;  in  caravans,  in  solitary  pilgrims,  staff  and 
scrip  in  hand,  journeying,  sailing,  climbing,  swim- 
ming, to  the  ends  of  the  known  world.  Notwith- 
standing all  it  had  against  it,  though  it  crossed 
all  selfish  passions  and  rebuked  with  unflinching 
severity  all  popular  extravagances  and  sins ; 
though  it  struck  kings  in  the  face  and  made  the 
rich  purge  out  their  luxuries  and  change  their 
lives,  yet  in  two  generations  after  the  death  of  its 
founders  it  had  risen  to  a  recognized  rank  among 
the  statesmen,  soldiers,  authors,  orators,  and  men 
of  learning  of  the  day.  Was  not  *'the  kingdom" 
with  '' power  ".^^ 

*  I  have  been  unable  to  consult  the  Rev.  G.  Matheson's 
"  Growth  of  the  Spirit  of  Christianity  from  the  First  Century  to 
the  Dawn  of  the  Lutheran  Era  ;"  but  from  an  epitome  of  its  con- 
tents in  the  Saturday  Review  (March  30),  appearing  as  the  proof- 
sheets  of  these  pages  pass  out  of  my  hands,  it  will  appear  that, 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  109 

America  is  the  youngest  child  of  the  western 
civiHzation.  The  carav^an  halts  on  the  Pacific 
shore.  The  "  star  of  empire"  takes  its  way  west- 
ward no  further.  Will  it  shine  forever  here  on 
the  same  faith,  alive  and  in  action,  and  eternally 
young,  that  the  star  of  the  magi  stood  over,  born 
with  the  young  child  at  Bethlehem  ?  That  prob- 
lem besets  all  minds  that  think  at  all,  and  gets 
an  utterance  of  some  sort,  if  not  an  answer,  on  al- 
most every  tongue. 

Shall  he  who  is  the  head  of  our  race,  Jesus 
Christ,  continue  to  be  acknowledged  as  its  head  by 
these  enterprising  Avestern  men  ?  Shall  the  revela-^ 
tion  which  has  guided  humanity  thus  far  from  the 
outset,  in  the  great  steps  of  a  divine  order,  and 
which  claims  to  have  completed  itself  beyond  the 
possibility  of  amendment  in  the  recorded  story  of 
the  Son  of  God,  guide  man  still,  under  its  con- 
clusive authority,  as  the  law  of  his  action  and  the 
power  of  his  life  ?  Shall  the  nations  that  lead  the 
world,  shall  this  Anglo-Saxon  and  American  race, 
in  particular,  be  permanently  Christian  ? 

You  have  already  the  answer  of  our  general 
proposition.  Christ  is  man's  eternal  master,  be- 
cause man  always  continues  man ;  and  without 
Christ  he  never  understands,  interprets,  com- 
pletes,  satisfies,  or   comforts   himself."     But   we 

while  some  of  the  colorings  and  conclusions  of  the  author  must 
be  open  to  objection,  his  historical  researches  afford  direct  and 
weighty  support  to  the  statements  in  the  text  above,  and  to  sev- 
eral other  points  taken  in  these  Lectures. 

*  It  is  no  part  of  the  object  of  this  reasoning  to  enter  the  pro- 
vince of  Natural  Religion,  and  to  offer  this  pre-adaptation  as  a 
proof  of  the  existence  of  a  personal  God.     At  the  same  time, 


no  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

must  see  Christianity  at  ivork,  if  we  would  know  all 
its  fitness  for  mankind.  Its  strength  against  every 
kind  of  disbelief,  whether  atheism,  new  religion, 
free  religion,  or  against  speculative  or  scientific  or 
literary  skepticism,  lies  largely  in  its  being  a  sys- 
tem of  action  and  a  power  of  character.  Much  has 
undoubtedly  been  lost  to  the  progress  of  the 
Christian  faith,  especially  in  later  times,  by  mak- 
ing it  too  much  a  matter  of  opinion  or  feeling. 
Opinions  are  individual :  they  are  therefore  things 
of  difference  and  debate :  they  are  invested  with 
changeableness  and  uncertainty.  So  with  the  feel- 
ings or  emotions,  which  are  the  most  variable  part 
/'of  us.  In  the  religion  of  Christ  both  these  in- 
gredients have  place,  because  that  religion  belongs 
to  our  whole  life,  touching  it  at  every  point,  hal- 
lowing every  part ;  but  as  surely  as  you  make 
piety  either  emotional  or  speculative  out  of  pro- 
portion, you  enfeeble  it ;  you  lay  it  open  to  the 
dissecting-knife,  if  not  to  the  broadsword,  of  the 

here  as  much  as  in  the  region  of  matter,  or  the  phenomena  of 
instinct,  the  argument  from  design  or  contrivance,  which,  in 
spite  of  the  objections  of  the  anti-teleologists,  has  lately  been 
so  ably  extended  downward  by  Prof.  Cooke  and  others,  from 
organic  to  inorganic  substances,  seems  to  admit  of  a  legitimate 
application.  Design  exists  where  such  adaptation  is  found  as 
implies  prearrangement,  an  intelligent  perception  of  the  quali- 
ties of  the  objects  mutually  fitted  together,  a  distinct  precon- 
ception of  the  end  to  be  obtained  by  the  adaptation,  and  a 
rational  use  of  the  means  necessary  to  reach  that  end.  All  these 
marks  appear  in  the  adjustment  between  the  constitution  of  man 
and  the  Christian  religion.  Whether  the  human  mind  is  able  to 
conceive  of  such  an  intelligence  as  these  conditions  imply,  as 
being  otherwise  than  personal,  is  a  question  for  consideration, 
but  not  belonging  in  this  place. 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  II  I 

unbeliever.  The  modern  church  has  opened  the 
gate  to  many  of  the  doubts  which  have  puzzled 
it,  because,  keeping  the  '^  word"  of  the  faith,  she 
has  let  go  its  "  power."  It  can  be  said,  I  sup- 
pose, without  dispute,  that  as  the  Latin  hierarchy 
damaged  Christianity  by  excess  of  outside  appa- 
ratus and  coercion,  the  tendency  of  Protestanism 
has  been  to  etherealize  and  rarefy  it,  to  lose 
sight  of  its  solid  base  and  its  concrete  events,  its 
transactions,  ordinances,  monuments,  verities,  in 
a  continual  taking  to  pieces  and  analysis  of  its 
organs  and  rationalizing  of  its  heavenly  mysteries. 
The  New  Testament  deals  to  a  wonderful  ex- 
tent with  actual  things  in  the  person  and  per- 
sonal history  of  our  Lord.  Follow  the  apostolic 
preaching ;  the  substance  of  it  was  the  Cross  and 
the  Resurrection — two  facts.  Look  at  the  apos- 
tolic practice  ;  you  see  baptizing,  missionary  jour- 
neys, a  diaconate  with  alms  and  charities  for  the 
poor,  a  sacramental  communion,  layings  on  of 
hands,  palpable  gifts  of  the  Spirit.  FaitJi  was 
the  necessary  inward  movement  Avhich  impelled 
the  whole  man  to  reach  out  and  take  hold : — but 
what  he  takes  hold  of  is  a  living  and  visible  Jesus, 
a  Saviour,  with  the  acts  of  his  mediatorial  career. 
Beneath  the  things  done,  to  be  sure,  were  all  the 
while  things  unseen;  but  the  seen  things  and 
the  doing  of  the  things  made  the  matter  definite 
and  real.  Had  the  primitive  church  been  more 
absorbed  than  it  was  in  constructing  speculative 
systems,  separating  doctrine  from  historic  inci- 
dent, missionary  sacrifice,  means  of  grace,  real 
life   and  the  living  Christ,  it  would   have   been 


112  LECTURE  FOURTH. 


more  like  much  of  the  modern  type  of  piety, — 
morbidly  introspective,  anxious,  dubious ;  and  it 
would  have  been  liable  to  all  sorts  of  hurts  from 
a  robust  heathenism.  When  it  became  needful 
to  make  a  creed,  lo  !  it  was  on  hand ;  it  had  already 
made  itself ;  for  it  was  simply  a  putting  together 
of  the  few  chief  realities  contained  in  or  cluster- 
ing around  the  Son  of  Man,  the  creed  which  clings 
to  man,  repeated  here  to-night.  No  wonder  the 
church  repeats  it,  for  it  has  become  the  flag  of 
her  practical  triumph  as  well  as  the  norm  of  her 
belief.  From  the  incarnation  of  Jesus  proceeds 
historically  and  logically  the  whole  visible  and 
invisible  system,  one  spirit  and  one  body,  one 
faith  and  one  baptism.  If  our  contemporary 
Christianity  is  in  danger  of  being  wordy,  disput- 
able, mutable,  and  divided  against  itself,  we  had 
better  turn  so  much  the  oftener  to  the  original 
pattern  lying  independent  of  the  little  ''systems" 
which  ''have  their  day  and  cease  to  be."  The 
Holy  Spirit  "works,"  and  by  an  ever-working 
body. 

The  tree  Igdrasil,  not  a  lifeless  Parthenon  or  a 
carved  Sphinx,  is  the  better  type  of  the  living  tem- 
ple. It  is  a  growing  thing ;  one  sap-stream  ani- 
mates each  smallest  fibre,  and  it  feeds  the  whole 
body  with  one  spirit. 

Come  to  the  apostle's  conception :  "  The 
kingdom  of  God  is  not  in  word  but  in  power." 
Notice  the  leading  term,  "  kingdom."  Had  the 
religion  which  was  embodied  in  Christ's  person 
and  preached  in  his  Gospel  been  intended  to 
tarry  in  the  world  merely  as  a  sentiment  or  idea. 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  I  13 

feeling  or  thought,  it  would  certainly  be  unaccount- 
able that  both  he  and  his  evangelists  should  so 
carefully  and  constantly  use  this  term  to  describe 
it,  because  it  is  not  possible  to  conceive  of  any 
such  thing  as  a  kingdom  or  commonwealth 
otherwise  than  as  having  certain  characters 
quite  beyond  any  mere  individual  forms  of  life. 
To  any  ''kingdom"  there  are  plainly  certain 
things  essential — a  head  or  king,  laws,  members 
or  subjects,  organization,  ordinances,  boundaries, 
and  unity.  If  against  this  it  is  objected  that, 
after  all,  Christ's  kingdom  is  not  literally  in 
sight  as  a  concrete  thing,  we  reply  it  is  in  sight 
just  as  every  other  kingdom  is,  through  its  insti- 
tuted forms  of  operation  and  constant  agencies 
of  "  power."  As  a  matter  of  course,  its  moral 
foundations,  its  reasons,  must  lie  in  the  minds  of 
men,  and  not  in  a  material  structure ;  and  that 
is  as  true  of  the  civil  commonwealth  as  of 
the  spiritual.  But  all  these  seven  attributes 
none  the  less  are  actual,  and  they  imply  neces- 
sarily a  corporate  life.  The  simple  recognition 
of  them  in  a  hearty  and  practical  sense,  is 
loyalty  to  the  kingdom.  When  we  find  our  Lord, 
therefore,  and  his  apostles,  in  proclaiming  the 
Gospel,  constantl}^  using  this  term, — when  we  see 
it  reappearing  from  the  first  opening  of  the 
Saviour's  lips  in  Galilee  after  his  own  baptism 
to  Paul's  preaching  at  Rome  between  two  sol- 
diers before  he  suffered, — everywhere  ''  the  Gos- 
pel of  the  kingdom,"  and  not  the  Gospel  of  the 
private  mind  alone,  the  conclusion  is  unavoid- 
able.    They  had  a  meaning  in  it,  the  same  mean- 


114  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

ing  that  St.  Paul  had  when  he  said  that  there  is 
one  body,  of  which  the  Spirit  is  the  life.  In 
this  conclusion  we  should  be  obliged,  I  think,  to 
rest,  even  if  they  did  not  go  on  to  tell  us  as 
plainly  as  they  do,  though,  not  in  the  manner  of 
human  constitution-makers,  what  the  laws  and 
the  ordmances  and  the  offices  and  the  unity  arc, 
as  well  as  who  are  the  members,  and  who  is  the 
everlasting  head,  and  to  give  this  kingdom  its 
evangelic  name,  the  Church  of  Christ.  Were 
this  conception,  Roman  but  more  than  Roman 
because  Catholic,  to  be  lost  out  of  the  mind  and 
heart  of  Christendom,  it  would  carry  with  it  the 
loss,  in  the  last  result,  of  Christendom  itself ;  for  if 
it  was  the  Gospel  of  the  kingdom  that  Christ  de- 
livered, then  a  Gospel  without  the  kingdom 
could  not  be  Christ's  Gospel. 

There  is  a  sharp  contrast,  "  word"  on  one 
side,  and  ''  power"  on  the  other.  It  raises  the 
question.  Wherein  does  the  real  strength  of  our 
religion  here  and  now  consist  ?  Granted  that  the 
original  constitution  was  perfect,  because  it  was 
divine,  holding  stored  up  within  it  the  living 
treasures  of  God's  truth,  something  else  is  want- 
ing besides  that  provided  economy  to  bring 
these  spiritual  resources  out  into  their  intended 
operation.  That  second  factor  is  man's  activity. 
Unless  the  two  are  brought  together,  the  whole 
outward  establishment — no  matter  whether  it  is  a 
hierarchy  under  Gregorys  and  Hildebrands,  or 
a  co-ordinate  with  the  state  politic  under  Tudors 
and  Stuarts,  or  a  free  church  as  in  the  primitive 
age  or  in   the   United   States — as  to  the  grand 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  115 

purpose  of  its  founding,  is  only  a  mass  of  inert 
mechanism.  Till  the  latent  energy  sleeping 
in  it  is  quickened  by  the  personal  arising  of  its 
personal  members  to  their  work,  it  is  only  like  the 
frame-work  of  the  first  day  of  the  natural  crea- 
tion ;  the  Spirit  broods  upon  the  deep,  but  the 
universe  sleeps.  There  is  no  life  born  by  action. 
There  is  no  demonstration  of  the  Spirit,  no  "  power." 
Traces  of  the  same  law  are  seen  in  the  king- 
doms of  physical  nature.  Two  agencies  must  act 
together  to  move  the  mass.  A  sower  went  out  to 
sow  his  seed  ;  he  goes  out  over  all  this  continent 
every  spring-time,  with  the  seed-corn  in  his  hand, 
how  often  forgetting  the  parable  it  preaches  to 
him  of  his  own  better  life  !  In  the  dull-colored 
thing  between  his  fingers  there  is,  to  be  sure,  a 
prophecy  and  2i  potent ia  of  life  to  come  ;  but  then, 
if  you  let  it  lie  in  dry  air,  or  seal  it  up  in  wax, 
it  will  sleep  on  under  the  same  insignificant  and 
fruitless  rind  through  a  thousand  Aprils.  In  each 
grain  there  is  a  force  slumbering.  But  it  is  not 
force  in  life,  not  vital  power,  till  husbandry  gives 
the  earth's  moisture  a  chance  to  unclasp  the 
crust,  and  then  the  blade,  the  stalk,  and  the  full 
corn  in  the  ear  publish  the  latent  beauty  to  the 
eye,  and  return  a  harvest.  Nay  more,  botanists 
tell  us  that  inside  the  husk  itself  two  different 
agents  wait,  side  by  side — the  germ  where  the 
life  is,  and  the  albumen  prepared  to  feed  it 
as  soon  as  it  is  quickened.  When  the  sunshine 
and  showers  rouse  them,  they  put  their  soft 
hands  together,  and  lift  up  the  green  plumule 
into   the   light,   and    sway   it    there,   a    kind   of 


Il6  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

banner  in  the  air,  for  the  triumph  of  life.  What 
was  sown  in  weakness  is  raised  in  ''  power."  A 
finished  piece  of  machinery  stands  on  the  track 
waiting,  every  bright  bolt  and  strong  lever  and 
elastic  spring  of  the  engine  perfect  in  its  place ; 
and  yet  the  whole  of  it  is  nothing  but  a  splendid 
heap  of  misused  iron  and  worthless  skill,  a  block 
in  the  way,  unless  a  touch  of  a  human  hand  lets 
on  the  propelling  energy,  adding  to  the  beauty  of 
construction  the  power  of  action.  In  all  the 
kingdoms,  the  principle  is  the  same.  The  ''  power" 
comes  by  bringing  together  in  their  appropriate 
conditions  those  vital  forces  where  the  Creator 
has  generated  these  capacities  of  life,  holding  them 
ready  for  their  work. 

To  me  nothing  in  this  subject  is  more  clear  than 
that,  for  the  greater  confirmation  of  the  faith  of 
Christ  in  our  age,  we  want  not  a  more  wordy,  or 
symbolic,  or  controversial,  or  speculative  Chris- 
tianity, but  a  more  operative  or  working  Chris- 
tianity, taking  the  kingdom  given,  and  carrying 
its  principles  into  society  ;  opening  the  windows 
to  the  Spirit,  and  then  going  out  in  the  strength 
of  light  and  air  to  let  the  Spirit  work  through  us. 
Most  of  the  ecclesiastical  troubles  would  settle 
themselves  speedily,  it  seems  to  me,  if  Christians 
were  bent  upon  turning  their  Christianity  into 
character. 

The  model  is  ever  before  us.  We  take  our 
stand  by  the  side  of  Christ's  first  men,  men  who 
knew  his  mind  the  best,  in  the  morning  hour  of 
the  Gospel.  I  am  confident  of  your  agreement 
when  I  say  that  the  most  manifest  mark  stamped 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  HJ 

on  the  church  as  the  Lord  made  it,  and  the 
apostles  worked  it,  is  action.  The  whole  body 
is  astir,  and  by  that  we  know  that  it  is  alive.  Evi- 
dently the  men  are  possessed  Avith  the  belief  that 
something  is  given  to  each  one  to  do.  As  soon  as 
a  Pagan  or  a  Jew  is  converted,  he  arises  and  is 
baptized,  and  that  is  action.  Their  worship  is 
active  worship,  responsive,  body  and  soul  adoring 
in  sympathy,  and  all  the  heartier  because  they 
come  to  it  from  labor,  and  are  getting  new  strength 
from  it  to  carry  back  to  labor.  The  praise  is  joy- 
ous, and  lifts  them  up.  The  prayer  is  penitential, 
and  they  kneel  down.  The  alms  go  always  with 
the  prayers,  a  sign  of  sincerity,  and  the  token  of 
active  charity  to  the  brotherhood.  Every  minis- 
ter is  a  missionary.  They  travel,  they  lodge  on 
the  sand,  they  swim  rivers,  they  climb  mountains, 
they  take  ship,  they  seek  especially  cities  and 
seaports,  the  nurseries  of  commercial  and  intellec- 
tual vigor  ;  they  go  into  synagogues — for  so  confi- 
dent are  they  in  their  vital  consciousness  that 
even  the  dryness  of  a  synagogue  does  not  frighten 
them.  As  soon  as  there  are  poor,  there  is  an 
order  of  Deacons  to  take  care  of  them.  Action, 
you  see,  is  written  on  every  thing.  There  is  no 
dead  fuel,  not  much  mere  "nominal  Christianity" 
yet — a  religion  known  by  its  ''words,"  however 
fine  the  words  may  be.  It  is  as  if  the  lands  grew 
light  by  torches  flaming  up  in  every  Christian's 
hand.  ''  Words"  are  spoken,  no  doubt,  and  winged 
words  they  are,  STtea  Trreposvraj  in  a  sense  that 
Homer  did  not  know.  Chief  among  them,  you 
hear  one  word,  a   Name,  and   in  that   Name  on 


Il8  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

every  tongue  is  the  hidden  source  of  all  the 
"power."  But  the  most  unfriendly  critic  could 
not  look  on  this  early  church  and  say  that  there 
the  kingdom  is  in  "  word,"  or  mistake  it  for  a  mere 
week-day  worldliness  that  goes  sentimentally  to 
hear  Sunday  preaching. 

Had  the  Gospel  brought  in  nothing  but  new 
theories  of  religion,  new  orators,  new  philoso- 
phies— why  the  Avhole  eastern  world  was  surfeited 
\vith  them  already,  and  its  hills  were  hollow 
with  dreaming  hermits'  cells.  Mankind  wanted 
a  faith,  and  a  faith  in  action ;  not  more  mystics, 
or  more  monks,  or  more  sophists,  or  soothsayers, 
or  incantations.  Christ's  living  witnesses  arose ; 
and  wherever  they  came  among  these  empty- 
hearted  nations  they  were  like  magnets  let  down 
among  loose  particles  of  steel.  They  drew  and 
grappled  to  them  the  hungry  souls  of  men.  Ac- 
tion was  the  whole  church's  rule,  and  the  king- 
dom was  with  power.  I  infer,  then,  that  the 
church  of  God,  being  alive,  has  its  energy  not 
only  in  its  tongue  but  in  the  steady  activity  of  its 
hands  and  feet,  in  all  its  organs  and  members :  and 
that,  where  it  is  so  alive,  men  press  into  it  and  it 
lives  on. 

You  say,  those  were  the  days  of  pentecostal 
wind  and  fire  :  and  so  they  were.  But  the  wind 
that  blew  in  the  upper  chamber  blows  still,  and 
the  fire  that  was  kindled  spreads.  Has  one  of  the 
original  principles  or  first  features  of  the  kingdom 
been  altered  by  time  ?  Not  a  single  truth  of  its 
teaching,  or  article  of  its  creed,  or  law  of  its 
operation,  or  condition  of  its  success,  or  promise 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  I  19 

of  its  victor}^  has  undergone  the  shadow  of  a 
change.  From  what  the  church  was  then,  we 
know  what  it  ought  to  be  now. 

The  Corinthians,  Christians  and  all,  were  exces- 
sively fond  of  handsome  speech.     They  made  a 
great  deal  of  their  schools  of  rhetoric,  and  even 
imagined  they  could  tell  truth  itself  by  its  style. 
They  were  essentially  a  wordy  or  literary  peo- 
ple, a  quality  in  which  Greeks   and  Americans 
are  not  Avholly  unlike.      Letter  was  put  before 
spirit;    word  before  power.     Among  preachers, 
Apollos  doubtless  had  the  largest  following.     St. 
Paul,  however,  always  adroit   in  taking  men  as 
they  are,  seizes  on  this  trait  and  turns  it  to  great 
account  for  his  energetic  argument:  '*  Where  is 
the  disputer  of  this  world" — sophist  and  logoma- 
chist  ?     Artificial  words  are  the  tools  of  the  pre- 
tender.    So  he  makes  them  stand  for  all  sorts  of 
substitutes  for  hearty  work.    Another  community 
might  be  given  to  dry  dogmatics,  another  to  a 
frivolous  ceremonialism,  another  to  feverish  and 
transient    excitements ;  —  and    we    could    easily 
enough,  if  it  were  civil,  call  the  names  of  relig- 
ious bodies  where   each   of  these  mistakes   has 
done  its  mischief, — while  others  still,  who  would 
be  in  every  household  the  most  numerous  of  all, 
would  slide,  through  carelessness  and  selfishness, 
into  a  perfunctory  sort  of  piety,  having  the  form 
of  godUness  without  the  power.     But  ''  the  king- 
dom" is  an  organization  of  life. 

All  along  we  may  try  the  doctrine  by  that  cri- 
terion. At  certain  epochs  there  are  luminous 
tracts,  belts  of  unusual  light.     They  always  lie 


I20  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

along  the  high-water  marks  of  spiritual  action. 
Because  men  prayed  with  unwonted  simplicity, 
or  fervor,  which  brought  them  up  stronger  to 
their  feet,  or  because  the  laity  joined  their  hands 
to  the  ministry,  or  because  some  great  wrench  of 
providential  revolution  snapped  the  hardening 
crust  and  tore  open  the  eternal  fountains  again, 
therefore  the  primitive  streams  broke  out,  and 
the  old  energy  revived.  Examine  these  splendid 
periods  and  you  always  find  them  signalized  by 
three  special  signs.  One  is  that  in  the  faith  and 
teaching  of  such  seasons  there  is  a  specially 
marked  sense  of  the  presence  and  influence  of  the 
Holy  Spirit.  Secondly,  there  is  a  strong  realiza- 
tion of  the  Person  of  Christ,  with  a  devoted  per- 
sonal loyalty  and  love  to  him  in  both  priests  and 
people.  And  thirdly,  besides  the  ordinary  offices 
of  preaching  and  church-going,  there  is  a  general 
co-operation  of  church  members  in  devotional, 
charitable,  and  missionary  action.  Laymen  take 
church  enterprise  into  the  range  of  their  busi- 
ness tact,  experience,  and  profits.  They  strengthen 
every  practical  arm  of  the  church's  benefac- 
tions— hospitals,  schools,  orphan-houses,  reforma- 
tories. They  gather  in  and  consecrate  the  floating 
philanthropic  impulses  of  the  people,  so  that  sec- 
ular benevolence  is  not  left  the  chief  channel  for 
men's  instinctive  generosity.  I  believe  these 
three  marks  are  never  absent  from  the  church's 
times  of  refreshing,  her  places  of  triumph,  and 
her  periods  of  *'  power."  The  best  spiritual  hon- 
ors the  middle-age  Christianity  earned  were  not 
earned  at  the  Vatican  or  in  the  monasteries  of 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  12  1 

Europe,  but  in  the  fever  swamps  of  South  Amer- 
ica, in  China,  Japan,  the  northern  forests,  and 
later  along  the  St.  Lawrence  and  the  Mississippi, 
and  in  Houses  of  Mercy.  Protestantism  has 
had  its  purest  life  when  it  was  freighting  ships 
with  the  Gospel-store  for  Iceland,  Labrador, 
India,  Cape  Town,  and  Burmah.  The  Avonderful 
Inner  Mission  of  Germany  and  the  City  Missions 
of  this  country  are  salt  that  saves  a  great  mass  of 
Mammonism  from  absolute  rottenness. 

We  can  look  higher  than  ail  this,  and  find  a 
more  conclusive  proof.  Follow  up  the  Christian 
stream  to  its  source.  Even  with  our  gracious 
Lord  himself  it  was  not  chiefly  what  he  said  that 
redeemed  our  race.  It  was  what  he  did.  Mar- 
vellous as  those  heavenly  discourses  were  that 
drew  to  him  the  listening  multitudes,  though  he 
spoke  as  man  never  spoke,  it  was  not  the  Sermon 
on  the  INIount,  not  the  parables,  not  the  precepts, 
which  made  him  the  world's  Saviour.  There  is  a 
higher  attraction,  and  it  acts  on  a  deeper  neces- 
sity. The  closing  eyes  of  the  dying  generations, 
age  after  age,  the  breaking  hearts  in  all  their 
mortal  agonies,  the  penitent  prodigals  and  har- 
lots, the  mourners,  whither  do  they  turn  ?  Not 
first,  and  not  last,  to  the  hills  of  Galilee  or  the 
streets  of  Samaria  ;  but  to  Gethsemane,  to  Cal- 
vary, to  the  opened  sepulchre.  These  are  the 
scenes  of  the  Saviour's  action.  Wonderful  is  the 
teacher,  but  more  wonderful  and  mightier  in 
power  is  the  atoning  suffei-er.  Wonderful  the 
prophet,  but  more  wonderful  the  priest  and  king. 
It  is  ''  the  labor  of  his  dying  love,"  the  mediatorial 


122  LECTURE  FOURTH.  ^ 

work,  that   creates  the  kingdom,  and  saves  the 
world,  and  fills  the  heart  of  man. 

So  Christ's  religion  is  a  living  creature — him- 
self its  life.  A  gospel  is  not  merely  something 
spoken  to  man,  but  something  wrought /J?r  men  and 
in  them.  There  is  to  be  not  only  an  oration,  but  an 
operation — as  a  '' liturgy,"  in  the  original  sense,  is 
not  an  oral  effusion  but  a  ''  service."  The  church 
holds  in  her  hand  the  inspired  Bible — her  warrant, 
her  charter,  not  her  substitute,  for  she  herself  is  the 
breathing  bride  of  the  bridegroom  ;  and  his  glory 
on  the  earth  is  her  love  and  trust  toward  him,  her 
chastity,  her  eyes  of  pity,  her  feet  of  mercy  swift 
and  beautiful  upon  the  mountains,  her  hands  of 
human  help  for  human  want,  tender  and  strong. 
I  see  no  eternity  for  THE  Faith  if  it  is  only 
sonictJiing  to  be  said,  an  ''  excellency  of  speech."  I 
see  only  a  feeble  future  for  Christianity  if  we 
build  churches  to  hold  rostrums  and  platforms 
only,  or  ordain  a  ministry  to  do  nothing  else  but 
discourse ;  for  so  we  turn  the  grand  office  of 
preaching — which  is  grand  with  the  grandeur  of 
the  Gospel  in  its  sphere — into  a  human  usur- 
pation. There  are  wants  that  this  will  never  sat- 
isfy. Three  great  parts  make  up  this  religion — • 
Christ,  the  Kingdom,  Righteousness — a  practical 
trinity  of  our  dynamic  Gospel.  Unless  that  Cath- 
ohc  conception  of  it  prevails,  the  world's  sci- 
ence, suffering,  toil, — thinking,  groaning,  weary, 
— will  reach  away  from  it,  feeling  sadly  after  some 
more  solid  salvation.  All  honor  to  a  voice,  crying 
in  the  wilderness,  crying  at  the  entry  of  the  city, 
crying  anywhere,  if  it  is  Wisdom's  voice!     But 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  I  23 

a  sinning  soul's  repentant  faith,  its  tears,  its  love, 
are  for  him  alone  who  comes  ''travelling," — 
through  the  agonies,  the  toils,  the  tears,  the  temp- 
tations, the  deeper  deserts  of  our  humanity,  on  to 
the  cross  where  the  sorrows  are  conquered,  and 
up  to  the  Father's  right  hand  where  he  liveth 
to  make  intercession  for  men. 

Real  in  itself,  in  the  intensest  sense  of  that  word, 
the  character  of  Christ  presents  to  every  age,  and 
to  every  age  equally,  the  ideal  of  humanity.  It  is 
not  the  ideal  of  a  period,  or  a  country,  or  a  class. 
Instead  of  passing  beyond  him,  the  whole  progress 
of  the  race  only  grows  up  towards  him.  Mankind 
as  a  whole  have  far  more  sympathy  with  that  char- 
acter now  than  they  had  when  it  first  appeared. 
Group  together  all  the  highest  moral  aspirations 
expressed  m  every  literature,  and  they  point, 
with  sure  consent,  to  a  pattern  which,  line  for 
line,  is  found  in  the  life  of  Jesus  ;  there  is  not  so 
much  as  a  pretence  anywhere,  by  friend  or 
enemy,  that  they  are  satisfied  in'  any  other. 
The  more  men  study  that  character,  the  better 
they  agree  that  it  is  higher  than  the  highest  on 
the  earth,  and  so  much  higher  that  no  merely  na- 
tural hypothesis  explains  it.  Take,  for  instance, 
Mr.  Lecky,  writing  eloquently  the  history  of  Eu- 
ropean morals,  apparently  in  sympathy  with  ra- 
tionalism, and  representing  its  very  ripest  culture. 
These  are  his  words :  ''  It  was  reserved  for  Chris- 
tianity to  present  to  the  world  an  ideal  character 
which  throughout  all  the  changes  of  eighteen  cen- 
turies has  inspired  the  hearts  of  men  with  an  im- 
passioned love  ;  has  shown  itself  capable  of  acting 


124  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

on  all  ages,  nations,  temperaments,  and  conditions  ; 
has  not  only  been  the  highest  pattern  of  virtue, 
but  the  strongest  incentive  to  its  practice ;  and 
has  exercised  so  deep  an  influence  that  it  may  be 
truly  said  that  the  simple  record  of  three  short 
years  of  active  life  has  done  more  to  regenerate 
and  to  soften  mankind  than  all  the  disquisitions  of 
philosophers  and  all  the  exhortations  of  moralists. 
Amid  all  the  sins  and  failings,  amid  all  the  priest- 
craft and  persecution  and  fanaticism  that  has  de- 
faced the  church,  it  has  preserved,  in  the  ex- 
ample and  character  of  its  founder,  an  enduring 
principle  of  regeneration."  What  else  is  this  but 
a  scientific  acknowledgment  that,  regarded  simply 
as  a  fact  or  phenomenon,  this  one  supreme  hnniaii 
pozver  must  be  accounted  for,  and  that  the  account 
of  it  is  not  found  elsewhere  than  in  the  simple  and 
modest  records  which  portray  it  ?  That  is,  it  is 
of  God,  for  man, 

"  Unto  you,  O  men,  I  call,"  once  more.  Let  me 
say,  as  earnestly  as  I  can,  that  it  becomes  the  men 
of  faith  to  bestir  themselves,  if  only  for  the  skep- 
tic's sake,  and  to  become  men  of  action.  If  there 
is  dulness  or  stupor  inside  the  church,  Avho  can 
wonder  that  there  is  not  much  attraction  to  her 
outside?  The  church  that  is  to  arise  and  shine 
between  these  oceans,  on  the  tops  of  these  moun- 
tains, filling  all  the  valleys  Avith  light,  must  be  a 
church  whose  plans  of  help  for  the  poor  and 
the  weak  are  on  some  scale  of  magnitude  com- 
mensurate with  the  energies  of  the  intellectual  as 
well  as  the  industrial  and  national  elements,  the 
drifts  of  emigration,  and  the  dimensions  of  the  con- 


CHRIST  GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  125 

tinent.  There  is  an  irresistible  fascination  in  all 
progressive  life.  Such  is  the  movement,  or  rather 
the  vioiiientum,  of  these  material  forces,  that  one 
sees  no  hope  of  any  thing  but  burial  and  an  epitaph 
for  a  Christianity  that  only  looks  over  its  own 
shoulder,  a  church  which  relies  on  nothing  but  its 
constitution  for  its  health,  which  repeats  its  creed 
no  otherwise  than  vieinoritcr,  whose  only  perform- 
ances are  imitative  or  automatic,  and  whose  sole 
pride  is  in  its  pedigree.  There  is  a  remarkable 
passage  of  Lord  Macaulay  where,  after  sketch- 
ing vigorously  what  the  new  philosophy  of  Lord 
Bacon,  as  it  came  to  be  called  in  the  time  of 
Charles  IL,  has  done  for  mankind,  he  concludes: 
**  These  are  but  a  part  of  its  fruits,  and  of  its  first- 
fruits.  For  it  is  a  philosophy  which  never  rests, 
which  has  never  attained,  which  never  counts  itself 
perfect.  Its  lazu  is  progress.  A  point  which  yes- 
terday was  invisible  is  its  goal  to-day,  and  will  be 
its  starting-point  to-morrov/." 

In  a  time  like  this,  then,  which  you  and  I  and 
all  the  preachers  cannot  alter  if  we  will,  and  would 
not,  I  hope,  if  we  could,  a  church  that  is  stationary 
in  the  business  for  which  a  church  exists  has  no 
place  and  no  business  to  be.  It  is  an  anachronism. 
It  is  not  only  out  of  date,  but  out  of  the  plan  of 
God.  Men  may  tolerate  it,  as  they  tolerate  in^ 
firmity  and  mediocrity  elsewhere,  but  they  will 
not  esteem  it,  or  listen  to  it,  or  give  God  hearty 
thanks  within  it. 

We  separate  here,  and  go  our  ways.  These  few 
hours  that  we  have  spent  together  at  the  Master's 
feet — the  common  Master  of  our  common  heart 


126  LECTURE  FOURTH. 

—  have  created,  on  my  part  at  least,  something  of 
that  human  interest  which  our  subject,  as  it  has 
opened  all  along,  has  revealed  as  an  element  of 
constant  attraction  and  power  in  the  Faith  itself. 
That  subject  at  last  becomes  inevitably  personal- 
I  cannot  bear  to  leave  it  without  coming  as  close 
as  you  will  let  me  to  the  vital  point  of  the  matter. 

Remember  there  is  no  loyalty  to  the  kingdom 
without  loyalty  first  to  Jesus  Christ.  Whether 
you  and  I  are  true  or  false,  the  Tree  of  Life  stands 
eternally,  its  leaves  for  the  healing  of  the  nations. 
But  whether  you  and  I  live  from  it,  and  so  live 
the  noblest  life  we  can  for  other  men,  and  live 
forever,  is  a  personal  question.  States  are  not 
strong  without  loyal  citizens;  armies  are  not 
strong  without  loyal  soldiers ;  universities  are  not 
strong  without  loyal  scholars.  The  church  is 
strong  in  her  divine  commission  and  in  her  Lord ; 
and  yet,  in  the  demonstrated  strength  which  men 
reckon  and  feel,  the  church  is  not  strong  and 
never  can  be,  without  loyal  Christians  on  earth. 
The  ''  power"  must  work  within  first.  Then  you 
are  able  to  sa)^,  "  It  is  no  more  I  that  live  ;  but  the 
life  that  I  live  here  in  the  flesh  I  live  by  the  faith 
of  the  Son  of  God,"  who  makes  God's  life  to  be 
the  life  of  man.  Within  God's  eternity  and  in- 
finitude of  love  our  little  lives  are  safe,  however 
swift  they  run,  if  He  and  we  are  friends. 

It  is  not  unmeet  that  the  argument  should  rise, 
as  it  ends,  into  a  higher  strain.  You  will  be  ready 
to  take  up  with  me,  I  think,  the  blended  notes 
of  confession  and  triumph  coming  to  us  across  the 
sea  from  a  brother  of  our  own  blood  and  language 


CHRIST   GUIDING  MAN'S  ACTIONS.  12/ 

and  faith,  as  profound  in  his  experience  as  he  is 
eloquent  in  his  verse. ''^ 

"  Througli  paths  of  pleasant  thought  I  raa  ; 

False  science  sang  enchanted  airs  ; 
She  told  of  nature  and  of  man, 

And  of  the  godlike  gifts  he  bears. 
But,  when  I  sat  down  by  the  way, 

And  thought  out  life,  and  thought  out  sin, 
The  burning  truths  that  round  me  lay, 

And  all  the  weak,  proud  self  within  ; 
Still  in  my  inmost  soul  there  wrought 

The  sense  of  sin,  the  curse  of  doom, 
Tdl  slowly  broke  upon  my  thought 

An  eastern  olive-garden's  gloom  : 
Hung  on  Thy  cross  'twixt  earth  and  heaven, 

I  saw  Thee,  Son  of  Man,  divine  ! 
To  Thee  the  bitter  pain  was  given, 

Bat  all  the  heavy  guilt  was  mine. 
I  know  the  serpent  touched  my  heart, 

I  saw  his  trail  on  hand  and  brow — 
No  sinless  thought,  no  perfect  part. 

But  sullied  breast  and  broken  vow. 
And  then  I  felt  my  need  of  Thee, 

And  pride's  illusions  passed  away  ; 
And  oh  !  that  Thou  hast  died  for  me 

Is  more  than  all  the  world  can  say. 
The  wounded  fawn,  in  yonder  glade. 

Beside  the  doe  seeks  rest  from  harm  ; 
The  babe  that  scorned  its  mother's  aid 

Flies  to  her  at  the  least  alarm. 
And  thus  I  feel  my  need  of  Thee, 

When  sin  and  pride  would  tempt  me  most  ; 
And  oh  !  that  Thou  hast  died  for  me, 

Is  more  than  all  the  skeptic's  boast." 

*  Bishop  Alexander  of  Derry. 


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